"I can't help it, old chap." Again the primitive note--the cry that there are limits to human endurance! Godfrey had not meant to utter it. The saying of it was an illumination to himself. Up to now he had thought that he could help it--and would, if he were faced with theories and irrationality. "Let's go to a Hall?" Bob suggested. "I'd like a quiet evening and just a jaw." Bob looked gravely sympathetic. "Oh, you've got it in the neck!" he said, with a touch of reverent wonder in his voice--something like the awe that madmen inspired in our forbears. Godfrey was possessed! "Yes, I have--and I don't know what the deuce to do." "Well, what the deuce are you to do?" asked Purnett. His healthy, ruddy, unwrinkled face expressed an honest perplexity. "Must be a rum little card--isn't she?" "I can't help it, Bob." "Dashed awkward!" In fact these two adherents of the code--may it be written honest adherents, for they neither invented nor defended, but merely inherited it?--were frankly puzzled. There is a term in logic--dichotomy--a sharp division, a cutting in two, an opposing of contradictories. You are honest or not honest, sober or not sober. Rough reasoning, but the police courts have to work on it. So you are regular or irregular. But people who want to make the irregular regular--that is as great a shock to the adherents of the code as their tenets are to the upholders of a different law. The denial of one's presuppositions is always a shock--because one must start from somewhere. It is a "shock to credit"--credit of some kind--and how are any of us to get on without credit? "Bring two more old brandies, Walter," Mr. Purnett commanded. It was the only immediate and practical step. "Not for me, old chap." Bob nodded accordingly to Walter. His face was inconceivably solemn. "I sometimes feel like cutting the whole thing," said Godfrey fretfully. "Well, there are other women in the world, aren't there?" "No, no. I mean the whole thing. What's the good of it?" The young man's fresh face looked for the moment weary and old; he flung his good cigar, scarcely half-smoked, into the fireplace. Bob Purnett knew better than to argue against a mood like that; one might just as well argue against a toothache. "Let's go home and have an early bed," he suggested. He yawned, and tried to hide the action. He was devoted to his friend, but his friend had raised a puzzle, and puzzles soon fatigued him--except little ones made of wood, for which he had a partiality.