ridiculous. That's the only condition Mr. Pierce has made."

Mr. Dick stalked to the window and looked out, his hands in his pockets.
I couldn't help being reminded of the time he had run away from school,
when his grandfather found him in the shelter-house and gave him his
choice of going back at once or reading medicine with him.

"Oh, bring her up! Bring her up!" he said without looking around. "If
Pierce won't stay unless he can play the friend in need, all right. But
don't come after me if the whole blamed sanatorium swells up with mumps
and faints at the sight of a pickle."

That was Wednesday.

Things at the sanatorium were about the same on the surface. The women
crocheted and wondered what the next house doctor would be like, and the
men gambled at the slot-machines and played billiards and grumbled at
the food and the management, and when they weren't drinking spring water
they were in the bar washing away the taste of it. They took twenty
minutes on the verandas every day for exercise and kept the house
temperature at eighty. Senator Biggs was still fasting and Mrs. Biggs
took to spending all day in the spring-house and turning pale every time
she heard his voice. It was that day, I think, that I found the magazine
with Upton Sinclair's article on fasting stuck fast in a snow-drift, as
if it had been thrown violently.

Wednesday afternoon Miss Julia Summers came with three lap robes, a
white lace veil and a French poodle in a sleigh and went to bed in one
of the best rooms, and that night we started to move out furniture to
the shelter-house.