Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/130

flabby washerwoman's limb, but the rippling marble of a Greek statue brought to warm life! Blackmore used to sit at meal-times neglecting his protose steak and making sketches of her while she wasn't looking. The best I could do was write verses about her. And while she played no favourites, I think she really gave me a little the inside track, because I talked physical culture with her more seriously than the others, who tried to make love to her a little too baldly.

"By this time she had us all doing calisthenics. The creaky floors of Mrs. Vesey's house used to resound night and morning with the agonies of our gymnastics. There was one exercise that Gloria told us she found particularly helpful. It was to lie down with the feet under a bureau or any other heavy piece of furniture, extend the arms behind the head, and then raise and lower the body a hundred times, pivoting from the waist. This was only one of fifty or more laborious accomplishments that we undertook for the sake of our goddess. No woman was ever wooed with more honest pangs, or with more repeated genuflections. As we lay on the floor before going to bed, raising our legs in the air two hundred times, or groaned in some sinew-cracking, twisting contortion devised by the pitiless Swede, it was the