That is a fair sample case.  But you say:  “It’s all very well for you to talk.  A man is tired.  A man must see his friends.  He can’t always be on the stretch.”  Just so.  But when you arrange to go to the theatre (especially with a pretty woman) what happens?  You rush to the suburbs; you spare no toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment; you rush back to town in another train; you keep yourself on the stretch for four hours, if not five; you take her home; you take yourself home.  You don’t spend three-quarters of an hour in “thinking about” going to bed.  You go.  Friends and fatigue have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely long (or perhaps too short)!  And do you remember that time when you were persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, and slaved two hours every other night for three months?  Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy—­the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day?

What I suggest is that at six o’clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal.  By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours.  I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy.  But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind.  You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize competitions.  You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five hours between 2 p.m.  Saturday and 10 a.m.  Monday.  If you persevere you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive.  And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., “Time to be thinking about going to bed.”  The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.

But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty.  They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match.  Instead of saying, “Sorry I can’t see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club,” you must say, “...but I have to work.”  This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say.  Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.

VI

REMEMBER HUMAN NATURE

I have incidentally mentioned the vast expanse of forty-four hours between leaving business at 2 p.m. on Saturday and returning to business at 10 a.m. on Monday.  And here I must touch on the point whether the week should consist of six days or of seven.  For many years—­in fact, until I was approaching forty—­my own week consisted of seven days.  I was constantly being informed by older and wiser people that more work, more genuine living, could be got out of six days than out of seven.