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Then Schonholz wandered in–five gulden a week board was the magnet–a cheese-faced, good-natured German lad with forehead so high that when he raised his hat Marny declared, with a cry of alarm, that his scalp had slipped, and only regained his peace of mind when he had twisted his fat fingers in the lad’s forelock to make sure that it was still fast. Schonholz had passed a year at Heidelberg and carried his diploma on his cheek–two crisscross slashes that had never healed–spoke battered English, wore a green flat-topped cap, and gray bobtailed coat with two rows of horn buttons (“Come to shoot chamois, have you?” Marny had asked when he presented his credentials.)–laughed three-quarters of the time he was awake, and never opened his kit or set a palette while he was in Dort. “Too vet and too fodgy all dime,” was the way he accounted for his laziness.

Last came Joplin–a man of thirty-five; bald as an egg and as shiny. (“Dangerous to have a hen around,” Marny would say, rubbing the pate after the manner of a phrenologist.) Gaunt, wiry; jerky in his movements as a Yankee clock and as regular in his habits: hot water when he got up–two glasses, sipped slowly; cold water when he went to bed, head first, feet next, then the rest of him; window open all night no matter how hard it blew or rained; ate three meals a day and no more; chewed every mouthful of food thirty times–coffee, soup, even his drinking-water (Gladstone had taught him that, he boasted)–a walking laboratory of a man, who knew it all, took no layman’s advice, and was as set in his ways as a chunk of concrete.

And his fads did not stop with his food; they extended to his clothes–everything he used, in fact. His baggy knickerbockers ended in leather leggins to protect his pipe-stem shanks; his shirts buttoned all the way down in front and went on like a coat; he wore health flannels by day and a health shirt at night (“Just like my old Aunt Margaret’s wrapper,” whispered Marny in a stage voice to Pudfut); sported a ninety-nine-cent silver watch fastened to a leather strap (sometimes to a piece of twine); stuck a five-hundred-dollar scarab pin in his necktie–“Nothing finer in the Boston Museum,” he maintained, and told the truth–and ever and always enunciated an English so pure and so undefiled that Stebbins, after listening to it for a few minutes, proposed, with an irreverence born of good-fellowship, that a subscription be started to have Joplin’s dialect phonographed so that it might be handed down to posterity as the only real and correct thing.

“Are you noticing, gentlemen, the way in which Joplin handles his mother tongue?” Stebbins had shouted across the table: “never drops his ‘g’s,’ never slights his first syllable; says ‘HUmor’ with an accent on the ‘HU.’ But for the fact that he pronounces ‘bonnet’ ‘BUNNIT’ and ‘admires’ a thing when he really ought only to ‘like’ it, you could never discover his codfish bringing up. Out with your wallets–how much do you chip in?”

These peculiarities soon made Joplin the storm-centre of every discussion. Not only were his views on nutrition ridiculed, but all his fads were treated with equal disrespect. “Impressionism,” “plein air,” the old “line engraving” in contrast to the modern “half-tone” methods–any opinion of Joplin’s, no matter how sane or logical, was jostled, sat on, punched in the ribs and otherwise maltreated until every man was breathless or black in the face with assumed rage–every man except the man jostled, who never lost his temper no matter what the provocation, and who always came up smiling with some such remark as: “Smite away, you Pharisees; harmony is heavenly–but stupid. Keep it up–here’s the other cheek!”

On this particular night Joplin, as I have said, had broken out on diet. Some movement of Marny’s connected with the temporary relief of the lower button of his waistcoat had excited the great Bostonian’s wrath. The men were seated at dinner inside the coffee-room, Johann and Tine serving.