"Does that mean _you_ can't?" he inquired a little acidly. And really I should not have been quite so abrupt with him, for his confession gave me the right cue to his treatment. A holiday, in fact, was all that he needed, though I doubted his ability to use one. So I assumed my heaviest manner, as one must when it is to be unaccompanied by an expensive prescription. "If you don't take one," I proceeded to tell him, "though you will probably survive with the aid of iron, arsenic, and an occasional Seidlitz powder, you will become eventually like those sorrowful civil servants that may be met at almost any time in Somerset House or the General Post Office. They have been pensioned for months, but there they are, unable to inter themselves decently among the mashies and geraniums of Wimbledon and Weybridge, haunting their former desks, poor forlorn creatures, whose one bond of life has been severed--a torture to themselves and their successors." While I was taking breath after this rather impressive harangue, he stared at me gloomily. "It has always," he said, "been my one great desire to die in harness." After congratulating him on the possession of so modest, if somewhat cheerless, an ambition, I asked him why he had come to see me. A physician, to a man with such a goal, seemed, on the face of it, something of a superfluity. But I learned that there was a wife at home, poor soul. And it was her doctor, he said, who had recommended this visit. "And I may tell you," he added, "that your opinion coincides with theirs." He handed me his two guineas. "Where shall I go?" he asked. By now of course I could see that my advice was going to be useless; but there was no better alternative. "Have you any hobbies?" I inquired. But he shook his head. No; he had never had time for hobbies. And by to-morrow afternoon he will be reading his _Financial News_ on Brighton Pier, and wondering when he can decently return. * * * * * But the dressing-gong has sounded already, and the embers in my fire are reddening into darkness. Outside, the wheels of a myriad motor-cars and carriages pass ceaselessly, and repass; and from beyond and beneath them, through the open window, comes the roar of London. I believe you sigh for it sometimes, don't you, down there among your moorland silences? Give me three weeks of it a year, and, as far as I am concerned, you might monopolise the orchestra for the other forty-nine. I don't particularly want my dinner, and I am still less inclined to talk amiably with the two dull, but worthy, guests--may the gods of hospitality forgive me--who are to sit at our board to-night. With the tired girl-poet, I am praying instead; God, for the little streams that tumble as they run. For there are times when I think that the best thing about Harley Street is that there are exactly twelve ways out of it, and this, I think, is one of them.