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 “There never was, my dear. I got along a good many years.”

“It was very different when the house below was heated. That stove isn’t safe when you keep the window open. A gust of wind might blow it out at any moment, and if you were at work you’d never notice until you were half poisoned by gas. You’ll get a fine headache one of these days.”

“I’ve got headaches that way before, and survived them,” he said stubbornly.

“How can you be so perverse? You know things are different now, and you ought to take more care of your health.”

“Why so? It’s not worth half so much as it was then.”

His wife disregarded this. “And don’t you think it’s a foolish extravagance to go on paying the rent of an entire house, in order to spend a few hours a day in one very uncomfortable room of it?”

The Professor’s dark skin reddened, and the ends of his formidable eyebrows ascended toward his black hair. “It’s almost my only extravagance,” he muttered fiercely.

“How irritable and unreasonable he is becoming!” his wife reflected, as she heard him putting on his overshoes in the hall.