In Suite A, Herman Medfield had eaten the last of his breakfast. It might almost be said that, sitting in the window with the paper spread before him and the sun shining in, he had enjoyed his breakfast.... It was a long time since Herman Medfield had eaten a complete breakfast served in the ordinary way. The road to the House of Mercy was strewn with a vast wreckage of fads and hopes and breakfast foods. There were long vegetarian streaks that excluded milk and eggs; and gusts of Fletcherizing--chewing wind hopefully and patiently; and there were wide negative deserts--forbidden fruits--no starches-and-sweets together, no sweets-and-acids, no potato-and-meat, no proteids-and-carbons. A long, weary, hopeless watching and coaxing of gastric juices, and infinite patience and cunning toward the vagaries of indigestion. He had "rolled the stomach gently," and he had lain with "a pillow under his back and head down." He had become a finical, peripatetic amphitheatre of constant, cautious experiment and investigation. And it had brought him at last to Suite A and the sunny window. And now in a breath, it seemed, in the Berkeley House of Mercy Aunt Jane's touch had broken the habit of years. He felt like a very small boy, who has been taken up and set down gently in his chair--and told to eat his breakfast and keep still. He had thrown caution to the winds and had eaten like a hungry human being. He had drunk great swallows of the delicious brown coffee--with cream and sugar in it--without a thought of diluted gastric juice, or secretions, or fads, or fermentations.... He felt almost well as he ate the last of his toast and read his paper and basked in the sunny quiet. And behind it all was a sense of security and protection; no telephone could get at him, no clicking of the tape could reach his ear and set his tired brain to work. So he had finished his breakfast and read his paper and had been almost happy. But now he had read the paper through three times, gleaning last scanty bits of news; he had opened the elaborate writing-desk across the room and investigated the neat assortment of pens and blotters and paper and ink--each sheet with its neatly stamped heading of the House of Mercy; and he was feeling a little bored. He stood looking down at the desk and fingering the keys in his pocket. Then he went over and stood by the window and looked out, and turned away and paced the room once or twice, fingering absently at the keys in his pocket. He wondered whether perhaps his breakfast had not been a little heavy, after all--two eggs for a man who had been dieting! And all the time his restless fingers--whether thrust deep in the pockets of his black velvet coat, or twisting a little as he walked, or jingling the keys--were rolling imaginary cigarettes and reaching toward a swiftly struck match--and the fragrant in-drawn breath of smoke.