Tompkins shook his head sadly.
"At the end of six weeks," he remarked, "he'll be starting for the sanitarium. Let me tell you, every private hospital in New York is full of cases like yours. You just strain the human nervous system a little too far, and bang!—you've broken something. And in order to save sixty hours you're laid up sixty weeks for repairs." He broke off, changed his tone, and turned to Gretchen with a smile. "Not to mention what happens to you. It seems to me it's the wife rather than the husband who bears the brunt of these insane periods of overwork."
"I don't mind," protested Gretchen loyally.
"Yes, she does," said Roger grimly; "she minds like the devil. She's a shortsighted little egg, and she thinks it's going to be forever until I get started and she can have some new clothes. But it can't be helped. The saddest thing about women is that, after all, their best trick is to sit down and fold their hands."
"Your ideas on women are about twenty years out of date," said Tompkins pityingly. "Women won't sit down and wait any more."
"Then they'd better marry men of forty," insisted Roger stubbornly. "If a girl marries a young man for love she ought to be willing to make any sacrifice within reason, so long as her husband keeps going ahead."
"Let's not talk about it," said Gretchen impatiently. "Please, Roger, let's have a good time just this once."
When Tompkins dropped them in front of their house at eleven Roger and Gretchen stood for a moment on the sidewalk looking at the winter moon. There was a fine, damp, dusty snow in the air, and Roger drew a long breath of it and put his arm around Gretchen exultantly.
"I can make more money than he can," he said tensely. "And I'll be doing it in just forty days."
"Forty days," she sighed. "It seems such a long time—when everybody else is always having fun. If I could only sleep for forty days."