Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/112

 utter unimportance in connection with the other. It is a contrast in which town life comes out a shabby second-best. There we are no more than the slaves of a precedent which we carry in our waistcoat pockets and frequently consult with feverish anxiety. The hands of our watch are but two tyrants, who make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a mockery and a sham. We rise, not by any means because we are through with sleeping, but because the shorter of these tyrants points to VII; and retire, not because we have not been ready for bed three full hours before, but because precedent whispers that it is a childish thing to make the most sensible of all moves before eleven o’clock. We eat, not because we are hungry, but because it is half after seven or twelve or six. In short, there is not a metropolitan of us all, who, when he winds his watch at night, is not slavishly committing himself to a definite course of action for twenty-four hours to come.