“You don’t understand,” said Mr Narrowpath, who still stood at my elbow. “All that elaborate grill room breakfast business was just a mere relic of the drinking days—sheer waste of time and loss of efficiency. Go on and eat your egg. Eaten it? Now, don’t you feel efficient? What more do you want? Comfort, you say? My dear sir! more men have been ruined by comfort—Great heavens, comfort! The most dangerous, deadly drug that ever undermined the human race. But, here, drink your water. Now you’re ready to go and do your business, if you have any.”
“But,” I protested, “it’s still only half-past seven in the morning—no offices will be open—”
“Open!” exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. “Why! they all open at daybreak now.”
I had, it is true, a certain amount of business before me, though of no very intricate or elaborate kind—a few simple arrangements with the head of a publishing house such as it falls to my lot to make every now and then. Yet in the old and unregenerate days it used to take all day to do it: the wicked thing that we used to call a comfortable breakfast in the hotel grill room somehow carried one on to about ten o’clock in the morning. Breakfast brought with it the need of a cigar for digestion’s sake and with that, for very restfulness, a certain perusal of the Toronto Globe, properly corrected and rectified by a look through the Toronto Mail. After that it had been my practice to stroll along to my publishers’ office at about eleven-thirty, transact my business, over a cigar, with the genial gentleman at the head of it, and then accept his invitation to lunch, with the feeling that a man who has put in a hard and strenuous morning’s work is entitled to a few hours of relaxation.
I am inclined to think that in those reprehensible bygone times, many other people did their business in this same way.
“I don’t think,” I said to Mr. Narrowpath musingly, “that my publisher will be up as early as this. He’s a comfortable sort of man.”
“Nonsense!” said Mr. Narrowpath. “Not at work at half-past seven! In Toronto! The thing’s absurd. Where is the office? Richmond Street? Come along, I’ll go with you. I’ve always a great liking for attending to other people’s business.”
“I see you have,” I said.
“It’s our way here,” said Mr. Narrowpath with a wave of his hand. “Every man’s business, as we see it, is everybody else’s business. Come along, you’ll be surprised how quickly your business will be done.”
Mr. Narrowpath was right.