peculiar circumstances of his life, he had reached
a point in his reading and study at twenty-four which another man could
not hope to reach before he was forty-five or fifty. Other men had done
daily work for a livelihood, and had only their evenings for their
heart's desire. Spencer was a civil engineer. Mill was a clerk in an
India house. Comte taught mathematics. But he, in all his life, had not
averaged an hour a week's enforced distraction: all had gone to his own
work. You might say that he was entitled to a heavy arrears in this
direction. If he liked, he could idle for ten years, twenty years, and
still be more than abreast of his age.

And as it was, he could not pretend that he had kept the faith, that he
was inviolably holding his Schedule unspotted from the world. No, he
himself had outraged and deflowered the Schedule. Klinker's Exercises
and the _Post_ were deliberate impieties. And he could not say that they
had the sanction of his reason. The exercises had only a partial
sanction; the _Post_ no sanction at all. Both were but sops to wounded
pride. Here, then, was a pretty situation: he, the triumphant
rationalist, the toy of utterly irrational impulses--of an utterly
irrational instinct. And this new impulse tugging at his inside, driving
him to heed the irrational advice of his critics--what could it be but
part and parcel of the same mysterious but apparently deep-seated
instinct? And what was the real significance of this instinct, and what
in the name of Jerusalem was the matter with him anyway?

* * * * *

He was twenty-four years old, without upbringing, and utterly alone in
the world. He had raised himself, body and soul, out of printed books,
and about all the education he ever had was half an hour's biting talk
from Charles Weyland. Of course he did not recognize his denied youth
when it rose and fell upon him, but he did recognize that his assailant
was doughty. He locked arms with it and together they fell into
undreamed depths.

Buck Klinker, returning from some stag devilry at the hour of two A.M.,
and attracted to the Scriptorium by the light under the door, found the
little Doctor pacing the floor in his stocking feet, with the gas
blazing and the shade up as high as it would go. He halted in his
marchings to stare at Buck with wild unrecognition, and his face looked
so white and fierce that honest Buck, like the good friend he was, only
said, "Well--goo