“Move!  Move!” insisted our host as before, and, if anything, more irritably.  “Say, you work like a crab!  What a motion!  If you had more head and less guts you could do this better.  A fine specimen you are!  This is what comes of riding about in taxis and eating midnight suppers instead of exercising.  Wake up!  Wake up!  A belt would have kept your stomach in long ago.  A little less food and less sleep, and you wouldn’t have any fat cheeks.  Even your hair might stay on!  Wake up!  Wake up!  What do you want to do—­die?” and as he talked he pitched the balls so quickly that his victim looked at times as though he were about to weep.  His physical deficiencies were all too plain in every way.  He was generally obese and looked as though he might drop, his face a flaming red, his hands trembling and missing, when a “Well, go on,” sounded and a third victim was called.  This time it was a well-known actor who responded, a star, rather spry and well set up, but still nervous, for he realized quite well what was before him.  He had been here for weeks and was in pretty fair trim, but still he was plainly on edge.  He ran and began receiving and tossing as swiftly as he could, but as with the others so it was his turn now to be given such a grilling and tongue-lashing as falls to few of us in this world, let alone among the successful in the realm of the footlights.  “Say, you’re not an actor—­you’re a woman!  You’re a stewed onion!  Move!  Move!  Come on!  Come on!  Look at those motions now, will you?  Look at that one arm up!  Where do you suppose the ball is?  On the ceiling?  It’s not a lamp!  Come on!  Come on!  It’s a wonder when you’re killed as Hamlet that you don’t stay dead.  You are.  You’re really dead now, you know.  Move!  Move!” and so it would go until finally the poor thespian, no match for his master and beset by flying balls, landing upon his neck, ear, stomach, finally gave up and cried: 

“Well, I can’t go any faster than I can, can I?  I can’t do any more than I can!”

“Ah, go on!  Go back into the chorus!” called his host, who now abandoned him.  “Get somebody from the baby class to play marbles with you,” and he called another.

By now, as may well be imagined, I was fairly stirred up as to the probabilities of the situation.  He might call me!  The man who was playing opposite me—­a small, decayed person who chose me, I think, because he knew I was new, innocuous and probably awkward—­seemed to realize my thoughts as well as his own.  By lively exercise with me he was doing his utmost to create an impression of great and valuable effort here.  “Come on, let’s play fast so he won’t notice us,” he said most pathetically at one point.  You would have thought I had known him all my life.