ve the Doc free physical culture. Did he care to
bring that issue to the touch? No, he did not. In fact, he must admit
that he had a distinct need of Buck, a distinct dependence upon him, for
awhile yet at any rate. So he could make no elimination of the
non-essential there.

Then there was Fifi. In a week, or possibly two weeks, Fifi would
doubtless reappear in his dining-room, and if she had no lessons to
trouble him with, she would at any rate feel herself free to talk to him
whenever the whim moved her. Had she not let out this very day that she
considered that she had a kind of title to his time? So it would be to
the end of the chapter. It had been his privilege to tell Fifi that he
could not spare her another minute of time till his work was
finished.... Had been--but no longer was. Looking back now, he found it
impossible to reconstruct the chain of impulse and circumstance which
had trapped him into it, but the stark fact was that his own lips had
authorized Fifi to profane at will his holy time. Not three hours before
he had been betrayed into weakly telling her that he was her friend. He
was a man of truth and honor. He could not possibly get back of that
confession of friendship, or of the privileges it bestowed. So there was
no elimination of the non-essential he could make there.

These were the short and ugly facts. And now he must take official
cognizance of them.

With a leaden heart and the hands of lamentation, he took the Schedule
to pieces and laboriously fitted it together again with a fire-new item
in its midst. The item was Human Intercourse, and to it he allotted the
sum of thirty minutes per diem.

It was a historic moment in his life, and, unlike most men at such
partings of the ways, he was fully conscious of it. Nevertheless, he
passed straight from it to another performance hardly less
extraordinary. From his table drawer he produced a little memorandum
book, and in it--just below a diagram of a new chest-developing exercise
invented last night by Klinker--he jotted down the things that Fifi said
a man must do to be like other men.

A clean half-hour remained before he must go and call on the young lady
with the tom-boy name, Charles Weyland, who knew "what the public
liked." He spent it, he, the indefatigable minute-shaver, sitting with
the head that no longer ached clamped in his hand. It had been the most
disturbing day of his life, but he was not thinking of that exactly. He
was t