There is something essentially companionable about the man with habits. A habit is a proof of contentment, of satisfaction. The man with habits accepts life as essentially a good thing. Otherwise he would have made experiments. He would have sampled new clubs, new restaurants, new houses. I admire the old gentlemen who lunch day after day in the same club and at the same table. It is good to hear a man say, “I have been to the same tailor now for thirty years, and he has not made me a bad suit.” We ourselves feel no inducement to carry our patronage to that particular house; but in these days of change and revolution, faithfulness, even to a tailor, is a commendable and righteous act. Laziness? Perhaps. But then, is not laziness a philosophy, the expression of a mellow, placid, harmonious nature. The war presented us with few more pathetic spectacles than that of the tired, harassed mortals turned out of commandeered hotels, adrift in a strange world, torn from the habits that had sheltered them for twenty or thirty years. They had grown old there, they had hoped to die there. They were trees planted firmly and happily in congenial soil. It was cruel to uproot them. It is through our habits that we strive at harmony. They are the feelers that our timidity flings out towards an illusion of permanence in an impermanent and fleeting world. There is a rhythm in the recurrence, day by day, of simple tastes indulged, of prejudices flattered. It is only the superficial people who have no habits; the rudderless, inconsequent people and those fortunate few who carry in the stability of their own temperaments a balance, a sense of continuity; and because it is towards that state of poise that we are aiming in literature and life, because it is pattern, because it is rhythm that we are seeking in our lives and in our work, we draw up time-tables and describe ourselves in interviews as persons of routine and method.