"Just at present it would be better for you to finish dressing than to, 'keep yourself quiet.'"
"My water is not hot."
The two friends puffed away at their pipes in silence for a moment; then Arthur continued:
"Not that I wish to say anything in defense of dawdling; for, if you will remember, the exordium of my discourse was wholly opposed to it."
"I shall not speak ill of it, either, for
"Idleness is a gift that comes from the Immortals."[1]
The two friends had stored away in their noddles a stock of quotations which they used as aphorisms, producing them as the exigencies of the case seemed to demand.
"But," continued Arthur, "laziness, in order to be pleasant, must be unattended by remorse and by dread of future consequences; it must be without fear and without reproach; one must have conquered the right to abandon himself to it, body and soul; for the only true laziness, what you may call loafing, pure and unadulterated, is that to which the body yields itself while the mind is chiding and reproving it."
He arose and commenced his toilet. For a visit so rare as the one that he was about to make and where such important consequences were at stake, he thought it was his duty to lay aside the black cravat that he had worn uninterruptedly for several years. He accordingly folded a white one and laid it in readiness across the back of a chair, but when he had washed his hands he calmly wiped them on his cravat, never dreaming that that bit of white linen could be aught,
- ↑ Paraphrasing Fontaine, "L'apologue est un don qui vient des immortels." (Wikisource contributor note)
