No hostess could be expected to relish that.

Hank was a bachelor's friend; he did not belong in a married household.

The abstract wife could not be reconciled to him, and Kirk, loving Hank

like a brother, firmly dismissed the abstract wife.

He came to look upon himself as a confirmed bachelor. He had thought

out the question of marriage in all its aspects, and decided against

it. He was the strong man who knew his own mind and could not be

shaken.

Yet, on the afternoon of the day following Mrs. Lora Delane Porter's

entry into his life, Kirk sat in the studio, feeling, for the first

time in recent years, a vague discontent. He was uneasy, almost afraid.

The slight dislocation in the smooth-working machinery of his

existence, caused by the compulsory retirement of George Pennicut, had

made him thoroughly uncomfortable. With discomfort had come

introspection, and with introspection this uneasiness that was almost

fear.

A man, living alone, without money troubles to worry him, sinks

inevitably into a routine. Fatted ease is good for no one. It sucks the

soul out of a man. Kirk, as he sat smoking in the cool dusk of the

studio, was wondering, almost in a panic, whether all was well with

himself.

This mild domestic calamity had upset him so infernally. It could not

be right that so slight a change in his habits should have such an

effect upon him. George had been so little hurt, the doctor gave him a

couple of days before complete recovery, that it had not seemed worth

while to Kirk to engage a substitute. It was simpler to go out for his

meals and make his own bed. And it was the realization that this

alteration in his habits had horribly disturbed and unsettled him that

was making Kirk subject himself now to an examination of quite unusual

severity.

He hated softness. Physically, he kept himself always in perfect

condition. Had he become spiritually flabby? Certainly this unexpected

call on his energies would appear to have found him unprepared. It

spoiled his whole day, knowing, when he got out of bed in the morning,

that he must hunt about and find his food instead of sitting still and

having it brought to him. It frightened him to think how set he had

become.

Forty-eight hours ago he would have scorned the suggestion that he

coddled himself. He would have produced as evidence to the contrary his

cold baths, his exercises, his bouts with Steve Dingle. To-day he felt

less confidence. For all his baths and boxing, the fact remained that

he had become, at the age of twenty-six, such a slave to habit that a

very trifling deviation from settled routine had been enough to poison

life for him.

Bachelors have these black moments, and it is then that the abstract

wife comes into her own. To Kirk, brooding in the dusk, the figure of

the abstract wife seemed to grow less formidable, the fact that she

might not get on with Hank Jardine of less importance.

The revolutionary thought that life was rather a bore, and would become

more and more of a bore as the years went on, unless he had some one to

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