g out all right, but it's a
downright nuisance, your having to diet and that sort of thing. And
I suppose you ought to follow directions, just to make us all feel
comfortable, oughtn't you?" Harold spoke with fluent sympathy.

Wanning sat down on the arm of a chair and shook his head. "Yes,
they do recommend a diet, but they don't promise much from it."

Harold laughed precipitately. "Delicious! All doctors are, aren't
they? So profound and oracular! The medicine-man; it's quite the
same idea, you see; with tom-toms."

Wanning knew that Harold meant something subtle,--one of the
subtleties which he said were only spoiled by being explained--so he
came bluntly to one of the issues he had in mind.

"I would like to see you settled before I quit the harness, Harold."

Harold was absolutely tolerant.

He took out his cigarette case and burnished it with his
handkerchief.

"I perfectly understand your point of view, dear Governor, but
perhaps you don't altogether get mine. Isn't it so? I am settled.
What you mean by being settled, would unsettle me, completely. I'm
cut out for just such an existence as this; to live four floors up
in an attic, get my own breakfast, and have a charwoman to do for
me. I should be awfully bored with an establishment. I'm quite
content with a little diggings like this."

Wanning's eyes fell. Somebody had to pay the rent of even such
modest quarters as contented Harold, but to say so would be rude,
and Harold himself was never rude. Wanning did not, this morning,
feel equal to hearing a statement of his son's uncommercial ideals.

"I know," he said hastily. "But now we're up against hard facts, my
boy. I did not want to alarm your mother, but I've had a time limit
put on me, and it's not a very long one."

Harold threw away the cigarette he had just lighted in a burst of
indignation.

"That's the sort of thing I consider criminal, Father, absolutely
criminal! What doctor has a right to suggest such a thing? Seares
himself may be knocked out tomorrow. What have laboratory tests got
to do with a man's will to live? The force of that depends upon his
entire personality, not on any organ or pair of organs."

Harold thrust his hands in his pockets and walked up and down, very
much stirred. "Really, I have a very poor opinion of scientists.
They ought to be made serve an apprenticeship in art, to get some
conception of the power of human motives. Such brutality!"

Harold's plays dealt