"But I have got that most uncomfortable thing, a conscience," he answered; "and I know it would stare at me as if I were mad if I proposed to spend such a long time in idleness. It would be outraging all my theories, besides. You know, for years and years back I have been limiting myself in every way—living, for example, on the smallest allowance of food and drink, and that of the simplest and cheapest—so that if any need arose, I should have no luxurious habits to abandon——" "But what possible need can there be?" said Mary Avon, warmly. "Do you expect to spend your life in a jail?" said the other woman. "No," said he, quite simply. "But I will give you an instance of what a man who devotes himself to his profession may have to do. A friend of mine, who is one of the highest living authorities on _Materia Medica_, refused all invitations for three months, and during the whole of that time lived each day on precisely the same food and drink, weighed out in exact quantities, so as to determine the effect of particular drugs on himself. Well, you know, you should be ready to do that——" "Oh, how wrong you are!" says Mary Avon, with the same impetuosity. "A man who works as hard as you do should not sacrifice yourself to a theory. And what is it? It is quite foolish!" "Mary!" her friend says. "It is," she says, with generous warmth. "It is like a man who goes through life with a coffin on his back, so that he may be ready for death. Don’t you think that when death comes it will be time enough to be getting the coffin?" This was a poser. "You know quite well," she says, "that when the real occasion offered, like the one you describe, you could deny yourself any luxuries readily enough; why should you do so now?" At this there was a gentle sound of laughter. "Luxuries—the luxuries of the _White Dove_!" says her hostess, mindful of tinned meats. "Yes, indeed," says our young Doctor, though he is laughing too. "There is far too much luxury—the luxury of idleness—on board this yacht to be wholesome for one like me." "Perhaps you object to the effeminacy of the downy couches and the feather pillows," says his hostess, who is always grumbling about the hardness of the beds. But it appears that she has made an exceedingly bad shot. The man at the wheel—one can just make out his dark figure against the clear starlit heavens, though occasionally he gets before the yellow light of the binnacle—proceeds to assure her that, of all the luxuries of civilisation, he appreciates most a horse-hair pillow; and that he attributes his sound sleeping on board the yacht to the hardness of the beds. He would rather lay his head on a brick, he says, for a night’s rest than sink it in the softest feathers. "Do you wonder," he says, "that Jacob dreamed of angels when he had a stone for his pillow? I don’t. If I wanted to have a pleasant sleep and fine dreams that is the sort of pillow I should have."