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“Yes, Marny, I’m sorry to say it, but the fact is you eat too much and you eat the wrong things. If you knew anything of the kinds of food necessary to nourish the human body, you would know that it should combine in proper proportions proteid, fats, carbohydrates and a small percentage of inorganic salts–these are constantly undergoing oxidation and at the same time are liberating energy in the form of heat.”

“Hear the bloody bounder!” bawled Pudfut from the other end of the table.

“Silence!” called Marny, with his ear cupped in his fingers, an expression of the farthest-away-boy-in-the-class on his face.

Joplin waved his hand in protest and continued, without heeding the interruption: “Now, if you’re stupid enough to stuff your epigastrium with pork, you, of course, get an excess of non-nitrogenous fats, and in order to digest anything properly you must necessarily cram in an additional quantity of carbohydrates–greens, potatoes, cabbage–whatever Tine shoves under your nose. Consult any scientist and see if I am not right–especially the German doctors who have made a specialty of nutrition. Such men as Fugel, Beenheim and–“

Here a slice of Tine’s freshly-cut bread made a line-shot, struck the top of Joplin’s scalp, caromed on Schonholz’s shirt-front and fell into Stebbins’s lap, followed instantly by “Order, gentlemen!” from Marny. “Don’t waste that slab of proteid. The learned Bean is most interesting and should not be interrupted.”

“Better out than in,” continued Joplin, brushing the crumbs from his plate. “Bread–fresh bread particularly–is the very worst thing a man can put into his stomach.”

“And how about pertaties?” shouted Malone. “I s’pose ye’d rob us of the only thing that’s kep’ us alive as a nation, wouldn’t ye?”

“I certainly would, ‘Loney, except in very small quantities. Raw potatoes contain twenty-two per cent. of the worst form of non-nitrogenous food, and seventy-eight per cent. of water. You, Malone, with your sedentary habits, should never touch an ounce of potato. It excites the epigastric nerve and induces dyspepsia. You’re as lazy as the devil and should only eat nitrogenous food and never in excess. What you require is about one hundred grams of protein, giving you a fuel value of twenty-seven hundred calories, and to produce this fifty-five ounces of food a day is enough. When you exceed this you run to flesh–unhealthy bloat really–and in the wrong places. You’ve only to look at Marny’s sixty-inch waist-line to prove the truth of this theory. Now look at me–I keep my figure, don’t I? Not a bad one for a light-weight, is it? I’m in perfect health, can run, jump, eat, sleep, paint, and but for a slight organic weakness with my heart, which is hereditary in my family and which kills most of us off at about seventy years of age, I’m as sound as a nut. And all–all, let me tell you, due to my observing a few scientific laws regarding hygiene which you men never seem to have heard of.”

Malone now rose to his feet, pewter mug in hand, and swept his eye around the table.

“Bedad, you’re right, Joppy,” he said with a wink at Marny–“food’s the ruination of us all; drink is what we want. On yer feet, gintlemen–every mother’s son of ye! Here’s to the learned, livin’ skeleton from Boston! Five per cint. man and ninety-five per cint. crank!”

II

The next morning the group of painters–all except Joplin, who was doing a head in “smears” behind the Groote Kerk a mile away–were at work in the old shipyard across the Maas at Papendrecht. Marny was painting a Dutch lugger with a brown-madder hull and an emerald-green stern, up on the ways for repairs. Pudfut had the children of the Captain posed against a broken windlass rotting in the tall grass near the dock, and Malone and Schonholz, pipe in mouth, were on their backs smoking. “It wasn’t their kind of a mornin’,” Malone had said.

Joplin’s discourse the night before was evidently lingering in their minds, for Pudfut broke out with: “Got to sit on Joppy some way or we’ll be talked to death,” and he squeezed a tube of color on his palette. “Getting to be a bloody nuisance.”