She turned quickly, unbelievingly. "You do not!" "Bet?" "Bet you flowers for me tonight." "Generous wager, I must say. Indecently feminine! Okay. Promise to admit it--if I have the right answer? No hedging?" "Promise." "You'll go out--on condition I won't make a pass at you." She flushed a faint peach color. "I thought you were going to guess I wanted to go Dutch." "I know you did." "How?" "I know how women think, as they term it." "You're right, though." I picked up her check and signed it and signed my own and signed the two sets of bar checks and gave Fred--who was loitering about in the background with overt patience--a sound tip. "Buy yourself," I said to her, "some dandy flowers. I like gardenias. I hate orchid-colored orchids. On second thought, if flowers remind you of Roland--" "He never grew them to wear--or for bouquets. Just to breed." "See you. And thanks for the indiscreet lunch." 3 It was, as they say, sweltering in my suite. Sweltering, like every term, is comparative and relative and also tentative. I like to swelter, as a rule. To work stripped and sweating, with a vasomotor system engaged in cooling me, rather than the opposite, which others prefer--a pumping system busy stoking the body against cold air. This--like most events and experiences--is more a matter of mental climate than physical. Such attitudes are self-taught, people-taught, or environment-taught. One's frontal lobes are liable--unless trained in every particular at autocriticism--to hypnotize the rest of the brain into compliance with the ego's demand. Suggestion rises at some spot in the throbbing cerebral tissues, or from without, and is snatched up by the cortex to be delivered back as ultimate gospel to the whole human establishment: great balance of the brain and all the instincts in it, spinal cord, nerves, organs and muscles. These, then, like a converted Christian, are compelled by one fallible new layer of the organism to adjust to the command. When the whole man cannot, the cortex founders in neurosis or psychosis. Usually, however, the adjustment, farfetched or absurd though it may be, is sufficient so that the mechanism goes on with at least a semblance of effectiveness. Its nutty operator is allowed to live; people aren't very critical--or even observant. Only in human aggregates is the effectiveness shown to be mere semblance. Men seen locally in time and space appear purposeful enough, reasonable, even charitable. Seen whole, they are clearly insane. And only one in a thousand sees that this collective madness is but the sum of little acts of hypnosis performed by his own cortex on his whole man.