"We have never read a finer defence of such Parliamentary discussion as the recent events in certain Continental bureaucracies have given rise to, etc., etc."
Words! words! words! that seemed to him to mean little and matter nothing. Yet as he chipped his egg he remembered that the writing of this leader had meant considerable mental strain. Oh, for a big happening abroad, when he would be sent and another would take up this routine work! He knew he was a far better correspondent than leader writer. His heart was in that work.
There were one or two invitations among his letters, two books were sent by a young publisher, a friend of his, asking if he could get them "noticed" in the Wire, and a syllabus of some winter lectures to be given at Oxford House. His name was there. He was to lecture in January on "The Sodality of the Knights of St. John"
After breakfast, the lunch time of most of the world, he found it impossible to settle down to anything. He was not due at the office that night, and the long hours, without the excitement of his work, stretched rather hopelessly before him. He thought of paying calls in the various parts of the West End, where he had friends whom he had rather neglected of late. But he dismissed that idea when it came, for he did not feel as if he could make himself very agreeable to any one.
He wanted a complete change of some sort. He half thought of running down to Brighton, fighting the cold, bracing sea winds on the lawns at Hove, and returning the next day.
He was certainly out of sorts, liverish no doubt, and the solution to his difficulties presented itself to him in the project of a Turkish bath.
He put his correspondence into the pocket of his over-
