"Quick!" he cried, as he entered. "Lead me to a square meal. Mary, please give me four bowls of mush, ten medium soft-boiled eggs, a barrel of sautee potatoes and eighteen dollars' worth of corned beef hash. I'll have two pots of coffee, Mrs. Pedagog, please, four pounds of sugar and a can of condensed milk. If there is any extra charge you may put it on the bill, and some day when Hot Air Common goes up thirty or forty points I'll pay." "What's the matter with you, Mr. Idiot?" asked Mr. Brief. "Been fasting for a week?" "No," replied the Idiot. "I've just taken my first week's vacation, and between you and me I've come back to business so as to get rested up for the second." "Doesn't look as though vacation agreed with you," said the Bibliomaniac. "It doesn't," said the Idiot. "Hereafter I am an advocate of the Russell Sage system. Never take a day off if you can help it. There's nothing so restful as paying attention to business, and no greater promoter of weariness of spirit and vexation of your digestion than the modern style of vacating. No more for mine, if you please." "Humph!" sneered the Bibliomaniac. "I suppose you went to Coney Island to get rested up Bumping the Bump and Looping the Loop and doing a lot of other crazy things." "Not I," quoth the Idiot. "I didn't have sense enough to go to some quiet place like Coney Island, where you can get seven square meals a day, and then climb into a Ferris Wheel and be twirled around in the air until they have been properly shaken down. I took one of the 400 Vacations. Know what that is?" "No," said Mr. Brief. "I didn't know there were 400 Vacations with only 365 days in the year. What do you mean?" "I mean the kind of Vacation the people in the 400 take," explained the Idiot. "I've been to a house-party up in Newport with some friends of mine who're in the swim, and I tell you it's hard swimming. You'll never hear me talking about a leisure class in this country again. Those people don't know what leisure is. I don't wonder they're always such a tired-looking lot." "I was not aware that you were in with the smart set," said the Bibliomaniac. "Oh yes," said the Idiot. "I'm in with several of 'em--way in. So far in that I'm sometimes afraid I'll never get out. We're carrying a whole lot of wild-cats on margin for Billie Van Gelder, the cotillion leader; Tommy de Cahoots, the famous yachtsman, owes us about $8,000 more than he can spare from his living expenses on one of his plunges into Copper, and altogether we are pretty long on swells in our office." "And do you mean to say those people invite you out?" asked the Bibliomaniac. "All the time," said the Idiot. "Just as soon as one of our swell customers finds he can't pay his margins he comes down to the office and gets very chummy with all of us. The deeper he is in it the more affable he becomes. The result is there are house-parties and yacht cruises and all that sort of thing galore on tap for us every summer."