and lean endurance, he suited the action to the words, “you raise your legs to right angles with your body—straighten out again—raise—straighten—raise—straighten—raise—straighten—if you do that a hundred times a day, when you get up and when you go to bed, I don’t think you’ll ever be troubled by fat around the waist,” he concluded quietly.
“I know,” Joel whispered, nodding with vigorous agreement. “I’ve tried that. That’s a good one. But a hundred times is a lot! It’s more than most people can do at first.”
“Yes,” said George quietly. “But you get used to it if you do it every day! I can do it a hundred times with no difficulty whatever,” he concluded quietly.
“Oh, of course!” Joel whispered instantly. “But then, you’re hard as a rock, George. You can do anything.”
“But that doesn’t look hard,” Howard said again with blithe confidence. “Oh, I just know that I can do that one,” he said mincingly. And without further ado, while everyone laughed, he stretched himself out again, extended his dapper flannelled legs as George instructed him, and then slowly raised them, lowered them, raised them again with such a painful grunt that everyone burst out again in hearty laughter. After the fourth effort he was through, admitting defeat with a painful “Gosh! If I had to do that for a hundred times I’d be ready for the undertaker,” and scrambled to his feet again.
“Then,” said George in his quiet, pleasant tone, “I think you’ll find this one good, Ida, for strengthening the muscles of the back and stomach. You arch,” he said, “you arch with the neck and feet—like this,” and instantly his strong, frail, beautifully proportioned figure was arched as lithely and gracefully as a bow, “—you come down slow like this,” he said, and sank slowly toward the ground, “you arch again like this”—again the light and graceful human bow.
“Oh, but that looks terribly hard to do, George!” Mrs. Pierce protested. “I could never learn to do that: it’s a regular circus stunt.”
“No,” he said in his quiet and toneless fashion, “you could do it, Ida. Of course, it is hard at first, but it would come with practice…. It makes you very strong,” he went on with a completely detached matter-of-factness. “Do you see that?” He arched his whip-cord body again and held it in that posture—“I could keep that up indefinitely—it makes you hard as nails,” he went on quietly, and without an atom of vanity
