“Exactly,” he agreed.  “I know you are all right and I’m wrong—­according to your way of thinking.  But if these people want to be well, why should I encourage them to do the wrong thing?  They eat too much, they don’t exercise”—­he turned to Mr. Van Alstyne.

“Why, do you know, I asked a half dozen of the men—­one after the other—­to go skeeing with me this morning and not one of them accepted!”

“Really!” Mr. Sam exclaimed mockingly.

“What can you do with people like that?” Mr. Pierce went on.  “They don’t want to be well; they’re all hypocrites.  Look at that man Biggs!  I’ll lay you ten to one that after fasting five days and then stealing a whole chicken, a dozen oysters and Lord knows what else, now that he’s sick, he’ll hold it against me.”

“He’s not holding anything,” I objected.

“Because he is a hypocrite—­” Mr. Sam began.

“That’s not the point, Pierce,” Mr. Dick broke in importantly.  “You were to come here for orders and you haven’t done it.  You’re running this place for me, not for yourself.”

Mr. Pierce looked at Mr. Dick and from there to Mr. Sam and smiled.

“I did come,” he explained.  “I came twice, and each time we played roulette.  I lost all the money I’d had in advance.  Honestly,” he confessed, “I felt I couldn’t afford to come every day.”

Miss Patty got up and put the baby rabbits into her sister’s big fur muff.

“We are all talking around the question,” she said.  “Mr. Pierce undertook to manage the sanatorium, and to try to manage it successfully.  He can not do that without making some attempt at conciliating the people.  It’s—­it’s absurd to antagonize them.”

“Exactly,” he said coldly.  “I was to manage it, and to try to do it successfully.  I’m sorry my methods don’t meet with the approval of this—­er—­executive committee.  But it might as well be clear that I intend to use my own methods—­or none.”

Well, what could we do?  Miss Patty went out with her head up, and the rest of us stayed and ate humble pie, and after a while he agreed to stay if he wasn’t interfered with.  He said he and Doctor Barnes had a plan that he thought was a winner—­that it would either make or break the place, and he thought it would make it.  And by that time we were so meek that we didn’t even ask what it was.

Doctor Barnes and Miss Summers were the first to come to the mineral spring that morning.  She stopped just inside the door and sniffed.

“Something’s dead under the floor,” she said.

“If there’s anything dead,” Doctor Barnes replied, “it’s in the center of the earth.  That’s the sulphur water.”

She came in at that, but unwillingly, and sat down with her handkerchief to her nose.  Then she saw me.

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed.  “What have you done that they put you here?”

“If you mean the bouquet from the spring, you get to like it after a while,” I said grimly.  “Ordinary air hasn’t got any snap for me now.”