“Once more,” he would say. “Pick up your feet, sir! Pick up your feet!”
And Jim would stagger doggedly past me, where I sat on the parapet, his poor cheeks shaking and the tail of his bath robe wrapping itself around his legs. Yes, he ran in the bath robe in deference to me. It seems there isn’t much to a running suit.
“Head up,” Flannigan would say. “Lift your knees, sir. Didn’t you ever see a horse with string halt?”
He let him stop finally, and gave him a moment to get his breath. Then he set him to turning somersaults. They spread the cushions from the couch in the tent on the roof, and Jim would poke his head down and say a prayer, and then curve over as gracefully as a sausage and come up gasping, as if he had been pushed off a boat.
“Five pounds a day; not less, sir,” Flannigan said encouragingly. “You’ll drop it in chunks.”
Jim looked at the tin as if he expected to see the chunks lying at his feet.
“Yes,” he said, wiping the back of his neck. “If we’re in here thirty days that will be one hundred and fifty pounds. Don’t forget to stop in time, Flannigan. I don’t want to melt away like a candle.”
He was cheered, however, by the promise of reduction.
“What do you think of that, Kit?” he called to me. “Your uncle is going to look as angular as a problem in geometry. I’ll—I’ll be the original reductio ad absurdum. Do you want me to stand on my head, Flannigan? Wouldn’t that reduce something?”
“Your brains, sir,” Flannigan retorted gravely, and presented a pair of boxing gloves. Jim visibly quailed, but he put them on.