“You’ll be a long ways off soon,” I said, touching the ring under my hand.

“I wish you could come with me,” she said, but I shook my head.

“Here is one dog that isn’t going to sit under any rich man’s table and howl for crumbs,” I answered.  “If he kicked me, I’d bite him.”

At eleven o’clock we had the clambake with beer in the kitchen, and Mr. von Inwald came, after all.  They were really very cheerful, all of them.  Doctor Barnes insisted that Senator Biggs must not fast any longer, and he ate by my count three dozen clams.  At the end, when everybody was happy and everything forgiven, Mr. Pierce got up and made a speech.

He said he was sorry for what had happened that day, but that much he had said he still maintained:  that to pretend to make people well in the way most sanatoriums did it was sheer folly, and he felt his responsibility too keenly to countenance a system that was clearly wrong and that the best modern thought considered obsolete.

Miss Cobb sat up at that; she is always talking about the best modern thought.

He said that perfect health, clear skins, bright eyes—­he looked at the women, and except for Miss Patty, there wasn’t an honest complexion or a bright eye in the lot—­keen appetites and joy of living all depended on rational and simple living.

“Hear, hear!” said the men.

“The nearer we live to nature, the better,” said Senator Biggs oracularly.

“Back to nature,” shouted Mr. Moody through a clam.

“Exactly,” Mr. Pierce said, smiling.

Mrs. Moody looked alarmed.  “You don’t mean doing without clothes—­and all that!” she protested.

“Surely!” Miss Summers said, holding up her beer glass.  “A toast, everybody!  Back to nature, sans rats, sans rouge, sans stays, sans everything.  I’ll need to wear a tag with my name on it.  Nobody will recognize me!”

Mr. Pierce got up again at the head of the long kitchen table and said he merely meant rational living—­more air, more exercise, simpler food and better hours.  It was being done now in a thousand fresh-air farms, and succeeding.  Men went back to their business clearer-headed and women grew more beautiful.

At that, what with the reaction from sitting in the cold station, and the beer and everything, they all grew enthusiastic.  Doctor Barnes made a speech, telling that he used to be puny and weak, and how he went into training and became a pugilist, and how he’d fought the Tennessee something or other—­the men nodded as if they knew—­and licked him in forty seconds or forty rounds, I’m not sure which.  The men were standing on their chairs cheering for him, and even Mr. Jennings, who’d been sitting and not saying much, said he thought probably there was something in it.

They ended by agreeing to try it out for a week, beginning with the morning, when everybody was to be down for breakfast by seven-thirty.  Mr. Thoburn got up and made a speech, protesting that they didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for, and ended up by demanding to know if he was expected to breakfast at seven-thirty.