He was waitin' at the station for me, with a high-wheeled cart, and a couple of gingery circus horses hitched one in front of the other like two links of wienerwurst. They were tryin' to play leap-frog as the train comes in; but it didn't seem to worry Jarvis any more'n if he was drivin' a pair of mail-wagon plugs.
One of those big pink-and-white chaps, Jarvis was, with nice blue eyes and ashes-of-roses hair. There was a lot of him, and it was well placed. He had sort of a soothing, easy way of talking, too, like a church organ with the soft pedal on.
Me and Jarvis got acquainted right away. He said he didn't care much about the physical-culture game—didn't exactly need it, and he'd been through all that before, anyway—but, mother and sister wanted him to take it up again, and Pinckney'd told what a crackerjack I was; so he thought he might as well go in for it. He said he'd had a little hole fixed up where one could do that sort of thing, y'know, and he hoped I wouldn't find it such a beastly bore, after all.
Oh, he was a gent, Mr. Jarvis. But what got me was the careless way he juggled the reins over those two bob-tailed nags that was doin' a ragtime runaway, and him usin' only three fingers, and touchin' 'em up with the whip. It was his lucky day, though, and we got there without an ambulance.
It was somethin' of a place to get to, yes—about a hundred and 'steen rooms and bath, I should say, with a back yard that must have slopped over into Connecticut some. That's what you get by havin' a grandpop who put his thumb-print on every dollar that came his way.
I guess Jarvis was used to livin' in a place like that, though. He didn't stop to tell what anything cost, or show off any of the bric-à-brac. He just led the way through seven or eight parlors and palm-rooms, until we fetched up in the hole he'd fixed up to exercise in. It was about three times as big as the Studio here, and if there was anything missing from the outfit I couldn't have told what it was—flyin'-rings, bars, rowin'-machine, punchin'-bags, dumb-bells—say! with a secretary and a few wall mottos, there was the makin's of a Y. M. C. A. branch right on the ground. Then there was dressin'-rooms, a shower bath, and a tiled plunge tank like they have in these Turkish places.
"Lucky you don't go in strong for exercise," says I. "If you did, I s'pose you'd fix up Madison Square Garden?"
"That architect was an ass," says Jarvis; "but mother told him to go ahead. Fancy he thought I was a Sandow, you know."
Well, we gets into our gym. clothes, picks out a set of kid pillows, and had just stepped out on the rubber for a little warmin' up, when in sails a fluff delegation. There was a fat old one, that looked as though she might be mother; a slim baby-eyed one, that any piker would have played for sister; and another, that I couldn't place at all. She wasn't a Fifth-ave. girl—you could tell that by the way she wore her hair bunched down on the nape of her neck—but it was a cinch she wasn't any poor relation.