suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the face and
admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that
you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal.
By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I
do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your
life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might,
for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in
some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind. You will still
be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic
scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize
competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five
hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you
will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some
sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of
that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., "Time to be thinking
about going to bed." The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes
before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not
living.

But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a
week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty.
They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a
tennis match. Instead of saying, "Sorry I can't see you, old chap, but
I have to run off to the tennis club," you must say, "...but I have to
work." This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so
much more urgent than the immortal soul.

VI

REMEMBER HUMAN NATURE

I have incidentally mentioned the vast expanse of forty-four hours
between leaving business at 2 p.m. on Saturday and returning to
business at 10 a.m. on Monday. And here I must touch on the point
whether the week should consist of six days or of seven. For many
years--in fact, until I was approaching forty--my own week consisted of
seven days. I was constantly being informed by older and wiser people
that more work, more genuine living, could be got out of six days than
out of seven.

And it is certainly true that now, with one day in seven in which I
follow no programme and make no effort save what the caprice of the
moment dictates, I appreciate intensely the moral value of a weekly
rest. Nevertheless, had I my life to arrange over again, I would do
again as I have done. Onl