all my life!—this place—tonight here—the most wonderful—”
“Come on,” she said quietly, with her warm, young laugh, and took him by the arm again. “We must be going back:—the others will be waiting for us—but it has been lovely, hasn’t it?”
“Why,” he muttered thickly and seized her hand again, “—why! By God! By God!”
When they got back to the house the guests had risen for departure, but were standing in an interested group around George Thornton, who was showing them gymnastics.
“Another thing,” he was saying, in his very quiet, pleasant, toneless voice, “—another thing that you can try is this.” With these words he stretched his slight and graceful figure—which was as tough as hickory and as flexible as a whip—flat out upon the bricked floor of the terrace.
“Try this some time,” he continued in his quiet, even tone that had a curiously hushed, still and almost sombre penetration in the deep moon-silence of the night. “Try lying flat out on your back some time—like this.” And he lay there, small, graceful, beautifully lithe, completely relaxed.
“And then what?” said Mrs. Pierce in an interested tone. “What do you do then, George?”
“Nothing,” he said with toneless quiet. “You just lie there—it relaxes you: a Hindu showed me how to do it.”
“Oh, but anyone could do that!” Howard Martin protested, in his mannered and rather effeminate voice. “Even I could do that, George.”
“It’s not as easy as you think,” George said. “You see,” he went on quietly, “it’s really a greater effort to be relaxed than most of us realize. Most of us are all tied up in a knot—so much more tense than we know we are. The thing you’ve got to do,” he went on with his quiet and fatal tonelessness, “is to relax—utterly relax—just let everything relax. You’ve got to lie so that everything—the back of your head, your shoulders, your spinal column—the whole thing—lies flat upon the floor. Like this,” he said, and just lay there, small, fragile, beautifully lithe and strong, and utterly, quietly, “relaxed”—his voice coming with a quiet and strange penetration from a figure that seemed inanimate. “—It’s not easy to do, but you can master it if you try.”
“Oh, let me see! I’m going to try!” little Howard Martin cried with the good-natured and unselfconscious eagerness that was really one of his attractive and appealing qualities. And completely unruffled by the
