"I should say not!" exclaimed he. "It's a hopeful sign that I know exactly how big a fool I am."
She shook her head in strong dissent. "On the contrary," said she, "it's a bad sign. I didn't realize I was making a fool of myself until you pointed it out to me. That stopped me. If I had been doing it with my eyes open, your jacking me up would only have made me go ahead."
"A woman's different. It doesn't take much to stop a woman. She's about half stopped when she begins."
Ursula was thoroughly alarmed. "Fred," she said earnestly, "you're running bang into danger. The time to stop is right now."
"Can't do it," he said. "Let's not talk about it."
"Can't? That word from you?"
"From me," replied he. "Don't forget helping out with Josephine. Let's go."
And he refused to be persuaded to stay on—or to be cajoled or baited into talking further of this secret his sister saw was weighing heavily.
He was down town half an hour earlier than usual the next morning. But no one noted it because his habit had always been to arrive among the first—not to set an example but to give his prodigious industry the fullest swing. There was in Turkey a great poet of whom it is said that he must have written twenty-five hours a day. Norman's accomplishment bulked in that same way before his associates. He had not slept the whole night. But, thanks to his enormous vitality, no trace of this serious dissipation showed. The huge supper he had eaten—and drunk—the sleepless night and the giant breakfast of fruit and cereal and chops and wheat cakes and coffee he had laid in to stay him until lunch time, would together have given pause to any but such a physical organization as his. The only evidence of it was a certain slight irritability—but this may have been due to his state of intense self-dissatisfaction.