He hated softness. Physically, he kept himself always in perfect
condition. Had he become spiritually flabby? Certainly this unexpected
call on his energies would appear to have found him unprepared. It
spoiled his whole day, knowing, when he got out of bed in the morning,
that he must hunt about and find his food instead of sitting still and
having it brought to him. It frightened him to think how set he had
become.
Forty-eight hours ago he would have scorned the suggestion that he
coddled himself. He would have produced as evidence to the contrary his
cold baths, his exercises, his bouts with Steve Dingle. To-day he felt
less confidence. For all his baths and boxing, the fact remained that
he had become, at the age of twenty-six, such a slave to habit that a
very trifling deviation from settled routine had been enough to poison
life for him.
Bachelors have these black moments, and it is then that the abstract
wife comes into her own. To Kirk, brooding in the dusk, the figure of
the abstract wife seemed to grow less formidable, the fact that she
might not get on with Hank Jardine of less importance.
The revolutionary thought that life was rather a bore, and would become
more and more of a bore as the years went on, unless he had some one to
share it with, crept into his mind and stayed there.
He shivered.
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