'Do you know what was the matter with me?' he broke out. 'It was just what you said. I was taking things too hard. The great thing is to be rational, normal. Thing with me was I used to go to one extreme and now these last two years I've been going with all my might to the other. Of course it wouldn't work... Do you know who's helped me a whole lot? You'd never guess.' Rather shamefaced, he drew from his pocket a little book bound in olive-green 'ooze' leather. 'It's this old fellow. Epictetus. Listen to what he says—“To the rational animal only is the irrational intolerable.” That was the trouble with me. I just wasn't a rational animal. I wasn't... Well, I've got to say good-night.'
This time he went.
Humphrey heard him getting out of his clothes and into the bed that Humphrey himself had made up on the box couch. It seemed only a moment later that he was snoring—softly, slowly, comfortably, like a rational animal.
The minute hand of the alarm clock on Humphrey's bureau crept up to twelve, the hour hand to one. Then came a single resonant, reverberating boom from the big clock up at the university.
Slowly, lips compressed, Humphrey got up, and in his pyjamas and slippers went downstairs and switched off the door light he found burning there. The stair light could be turned off upstairs.
Then, instead of going up, he opened the door and stood looking out on the calm village night.
'Of all the——' he muttered inconclusively. 'Why it's—he's a—— Good God! It's the limit! It's—it's intolerable.'
The word, floating from his own lips, caught his ear. His frown began, very slowly, to relax. A dry, grudging smile wrinkled its way across his mobile face. And he nodded, deliberately. 'Epictetus,' he remarked, 'was right.'