Perhaps this was more of his "fishing" gambit-a mere professional habit.

I shall speak of it as "true" memory, to distinguish it from mere habit acquired through past experience.

One of them, apparently out of mere habit, began to make a fire with a bow-drill.

Or perhaps I do it out of mere habit, because I have done it before.

The precaution of quiet was unnecessary, a mere habit.

He wondered if they were not mere habits, engraved in the synapses of his brain.

An itch that had long, since turned into mere habit. . . He sat up and opened his middle drawer.

I wonder sometimes whether, perhaps, if the two armies had come awake in an instant, the battle, by mere habit and inertia, might not have begun.

Decker figured his exclusive thinking was mere habit.

It was a perfectly ordinary thing, probably mere habit on her part, but it touched him.