arly eleven
o'clock, and he had come in directly after dinner, ample time to have
prepared his work for the next day; but as yet he had made no move in
that direction. On the roll-top desk, with its convenient drop light, was
an armful of reference books and two late scientific magazines. They were
still untouched, however, bound tight by the strap with which they had
been carried.

But one sign of his prolonged presence was visible in the room. That, a
loose pile of manuscript alternately hastily scribbled and painfully
exact, told of the varying moods under which it had been produced;--that
and a tiny pile of cigarette stumps in the nearby ash-tray, some
scarcely lit and others burned to a tiny stump, which had become the
manuscripts' invariable companion.

For more than an hour now, however, he had not been writing. The night
was frosty and he had lit the gas in the imitation fireplace. The open
flame had proved compellingly fascinating and, once stretched comfortably
in the big Turkish rocker before it, duty had called less and less
insistently and there he had remained. For half an hour thereafter he had
scarcely stirred; then, without warning, he had risen. On the mantel
above the grate was a collection of articles indigenous to a bachelor's
den: a box half filled with cigars, a jar of tobacco, a collection of
pipes, a cut-glass decanter shaded dull red in the electric light. It was
toward the latter that he turned, not by chance but with definite
purpose, and without hesitation poured a whiskey glass level full. There
was no attendant siphon or water convenient and he drank the liquor raw
and returned the glass to its place. It was not the quasi-aesthetic
tippling of comradery but the deliberate drinking of one with a cause,
real or fancied, therefor and for its effect; and as he drank he shivered
involuntarily with the instinctive aversion to raw liquor of one to whom
the action has not become habitual. Afterward he remained standing for a
moment while his eyes wandered aimlessly around the familiar room. As he
did so his glance fell upon the pile of text-books, mute reminder of a
lecture yet unprepared, and for an instant he stood undecided. With a
characteristic shrug of distaste and annoyance, of dismissal as well, he
resumed his seat, his slippered feet spread wide to catch the heat.

Another half-hour passed so, the room silent save for the deliberate
ticking of a big wall clock and the purr of the gas in