And now he says: 

“I suppose you mean me to ‘take up’ one of these things?”

I do, seeing that he has hitherto neglected so clear a duty.  If he had attended to it earlier, and with perseverance he would not be in the humiliating situation of exclaiming bitterly that he has no pleasure in life.

“But,” he resists, “you know perfectly well that I have no time!”

To which I am obliged to make reply: 

“My dear sir, it is not your wife you are talking to.  Kindly be honest with me.”

I admit that his business is very exhausting and exigent.  For the sake of argument I will grant that he cannot safely give it an instant’s less time than he is now giving it.  But even so his business does not absorb at the outside more than seventy hours of the hundred and ten hours during which he is wide awake each week.  The rest of the time he spends either in performing necessary acts in a tedious way or in performing acts which are not only tedious to him, but utterly unnecessary (for his own hypothesis is that he gets no pleasure out of life)—­visiting, dinner-giving, cards, newspaper-reading, placid domestic evenings, evenings out, bar-lounging, sitting aimlessly around, dandifying himself, week-ending, theatres, classical concerts, literature, suburban train-travelling, staying up late, being in the swim, even golf.  In whatever manner he is whittling away his leisure, it is the wrong manner, for the sole reason that it bores him.  Moreover, all whittling of leisure is a mistake.  Leisure, like work, should be organized, and it should be organized in large pieces.

The proper course clearly is to substitute acts which promise to be interesting for acts which have proved themselves to produce nothing but tedium, and to carry out the change with brains, in a business spirit.  And the first essential is to recognize that something has definitely to go by the board.

He protests: 

“But I do only the usual things—­what everybody else does!  And then it’s time to go to bed.”

The case, however, is his case, not everybody else’s case.  Why should he submit to everlasting boredom for the mere sake of acting like everybody else?

He continues in the same strain: 

“But you are asking me to change my whole life—­at my age!”

Nothing of the sort!  I am only suggesting that he should begin to live.

And then finally he cries: 

“It’s too drastic.  I haven’t the pluck!”

Now we are coming to the real point.

IV