Where it BELONGS? he queried, in rebellion against his own pattern. Who passed that law?

He discovered that he always closed his eyes when he brushed his teeth; furiously discovered that he had to close his eyes.

It was distressing to admit that Sara could be right. Then it was time to break the mould of his job and household and tricks of personal habit, do anything, go anywhere, before he was encased in the coffin of routine, a living dead man.

Yes, and he’d do it, too. Wasn’t going to permit even the best of habits to be his master. Already, he exulted, as he drew on his coat and started downstairs, he was changing . . . and noticed then that he had, as on every morning these last twenty years, coughed a tiny and perfectly meaningless cough at the exact moment when he tucked his watch into his lower left-hand vest pocket . . . and that if he had inconceivably ever found the watch in any other pocket, he would have felt naked.

So, with his exultations quenched, he went down to breakfast, in the scarlet-and-canary-yellow ‘nook’ off the butler’s pantry, and as he heard himself muttering to the maid, ‘I’ll have my coffee right with my porridge’, he realized that he had said this once a day for decades . . . and realized that if the Morning Recorder had not been there, exactly where it ‘belonged’, six inches to the right of his water glass, he would have felt himself betrayed by his nearest and dearest.

‘Looks like I’ve gotten in such a habit I simply can’t start the day without coffee and the baseball news. I better get out of this quick.’

It was rather too bad, because for years he had enjoyed his anecdotes about how ludicrously punctual his father had always been. ‘Yessir, neighbours used to set their clocks by him. Made it kind of hard for a wild bunch like us young uns!’ . . . How many times, for how many years, had he been saying that? he wondered.

Hazel, as always — and he now perceived that she had her own rigidities of habit — came down to breakfast as he was finishing. She was, as always, drowsily apologetic for being late, but she was so downy, so soft in her grey-and-crimson négligé, so like a robin with ruffled feathers, that her comfortableness reassured him. He would achieve freedom, yes; but no concept of freedom that did not include the presence of Hazel was imaginable. He was as married as a cooing dove or an Anglican bishop. Once or twice in his cheery life he may have looked with approval upon a cigar-store wench or a grass-widow customer, but he had never wanted to live on either cream puffs or caviare; and he knew that he would be for ever hungry without the honest bread and butter of Hazel.

‘Well, still like to maybe travel a little?’ he said.