"Why not?" said she, promptly. "Mary is my witness you promised. You wouldn't go and desert two poor lone women?"
"But I have got that most uncomfortable thing, a conscience," he answered; "and I know it would stare at me as if I were mad if I proposed to spend such a long time in idleness. It would be outraging all my theories, besides. You know, for years and years back I have been limiting myself in every way—living, for example, on the smallest allowance of food and drink, and that of the simplest and cheapest—so that if any need arose, I should have no luxurious habits to abandon——"
"But what possible need can there be?" said Mary Avon, warmly.
"Do you expect to spend your life in a jail?" said the other woman.
"No," said he, quite simply. "But I will give you an instance of what a man who devotes himself to his profession may have to do. A friend of mine, who is one of the highest living authorities on Materia Medica, refused all invitations for three months, and during the whole of that time lived each day on precisely the same food and drink, weighed out in exact quantities, so as to determine the effect of particular drugs on himself. Well, you know, you should be ready to do that——"
"Oh, how wrong you are!" says Mary Avon, with the same impetuosity. "A man who works as hard as you do should not sacrifice yourself to a theory. And what is it? It is quite foolish!"
"Mary!" her friend says.
"It is," she says, with generous warmth. "It is like a man who goes through life with a coffin on his back, so that he may be ready for death. Don't you think that when death comes it will be time enough to be getting the coffin?"
This was a poser.
"You know quite well," she says, "that when the real occasion offered, like the one you describe, you could deny yourself any luxuries readily enough; why should you do so now?"