beckoning finger. His wife
approached.

"Don't let him fall in love with that young woman. It's no good."

"Well, she must marry somebody, Henry."

"Big fishes mate with big fishes--minnows with minnows."

"Don't run down your own son, sir. Who, pray, is too good for him?"

"The world is divided into wise men, fools, and mothers. The characters
of the first two are mingled--disproportionately--in the last," said Dr.
Roughsedge, patiently enduring the kiss his wife inflicted on him.
"Don't kiss me, Patricia--don't tread on my proofs--go away--and tell
Jane not to forget my tea because you have gone out."

Mrs. Roughsedge departed, and the doctor, who was devoted to her, sank
at once into that disorderly welter of proofs and smoke which
represented to him the best of the day. The morning he reserved for hard
work, and during the course of it he smoked but one pipe. A quotation
from Fuller which was often on his lips expressed his point of view:
"Spill not the morning, which is the quintessence of the day, in
recreation. For sleep itself is a recreation. And to open the morning
thereto is to add sauce to sauce."

But in the afternoon he gave himself to all the delightful bye-tasks:
the works of supererogation, the excursions into side paths, the
niggling with proofs, the toying with style, the potterings and
polishings, the ruminations, and rewritings and refinements which make
the joy of the man of letters. For five-and-twenty years he had been a
busy Cambridge coach, tied year in and year out to the same strictness
of hours, the same monotony of subjects, the same patient drumming on
thick heads and dull brains. Now that was all over. A brother had left
him a little money; he had saved the rest. At sixty he had begun to
live. He was editing a series of reprints for the Cambridge University
Press, and what mortal man could want more than a good wife and son, a
cottage to live in, a fair cook, unlimited pipes, no debts, and the best
of English literature to browse in? The rural afternoon, especially,
when he smoked and grubbed and divagated as he pleased, was alone enough
to make the five-and-twenty years of "swink" worth while.

Mrs. Roughsedge stayed to give very particular orders to the
house-parlormaid about the doctor's tea, to open a window in the tiny
drawing-room, and to put up in brown paper a pair of bed-socks
that she had just finished knitting for an old man in one of the
parish-houses. Then she joined