"Certainly I know how to wash my toes," replied the other irritably and straightening up, "and what's more, I'd like you to know that I am a gentleman."
"Well, then, if you're a gentleman," retorted the other, "you ought to know how to wash your toes. Wash 'em—and don't talk back!"
"Pah!" exclaimed the bather now, looking twice as ridiculous as before. "I'm not used to having such language addressed to me."
"I can't help that," said Culhane. "If you knew how to wash your toes perhaps you wouldn't have to have such language addressed to you."
"Oh, hell!" fumed the other. "This is positively outrageous! I'll leave the place, by George!"
"Very well," rejoined the other, "only before you go you'll have to wash your toes!"
And he did, the host standing by and calmly watching the performance until it was finally completed.
It was just this atmosphere which made the place the most astonishing in which I have ever been. It seemed to be drawing the celebrated and the successful as a magnet might iron, and yet it offered conditions which one might presume they would be most opposed to. No one here was really any one, however much he might be outside. Our host was all. He had a great blazing personality which dominated everybody, and he did not hesitate to show before one and all that he did so do.
Breakfast here consisted of a cereal, a chop and coffee—plentiful but very plain, I thought. After breakfast, between eight-thirty and eleven, we were free to do as we chose: write letters, pack our bags if we were leaving, do up our laundry to be sent out, read, or merely sit about. At eleven, or ten-thirty, according to the nature of the exercise, one had to join a group, either one that was to do the long or short block, as they were known here, or one that was to ride horseback, all exercises being so timed that by proper execution one would arrive at the bathroom door in time to bathe, dress and take ten minutes' rest before luncheon. These exercises were simple enough in themselves, consisting, as they did in the case of the long and the short blocks (the long block seven, the short four miles in length), of our walking, or walking and running betimes, about or over courses laid up hill and down dale, over or through unpaved mudroads in many instances, along dry or wet beds of brooks or streams, and across stony or weedy fields, often still damp with dew or the spring rains. But in most cases, when people had not taken any regular exercise for a long time, this was by no means easy. The first day I thought I should never make it, and I was by no means a poor walker. Others, the new ones especially, often gave out and had to be sent for, or came in an hour late to be most severely and irritatingly ragged by the host. He seemed to all but despise weakness and had apparently a thousand disagreeable ways of showing it.
"If you want to see what poor bags of mush some people can become," he once said in regard to some poor specimen who had seemingly had great difficulty in doing the short block, "look at this. Here comes a man sent out to do four measly country miles in fifty minutes, and look at him. You'd think he was going to die. He probably thinks so himself. In New York he'd do seventeen miles in a night running from barroom to barroom or one lobster palace to another—that's a good name for them, by the way—and never say a word. But out here in the country, with plenty of fresh air and a night's rest and a good breakfast, he can't even do four miles in fifty minutes! Think of it! And he probably thinks of himself as a man—boasts before his friends, or his wife, anyhow. Lord!"