rvading sense of physical well-being resultant upon a half
hour's kneading of none too firm muscles on the marble slabs.

It was like Jesse Hogarty--or Flash Hogarty, as he had been styled by
the sporting reporters of the saffron dailies ten years back, when it
was said that he could hit faster and harder out of a clinch than any
lightweight who ever stood in canvas shoes--to refuse to transfer his
place to some locality a bit nearer Fifty-seventh Street, even when it
chanced, as it did with every passing year, that he drew his
patrons--at an alarmingly high rate per patron--almost entirely from
far uptown.

"This isn't a turkish bath," Flash Hogarty was accustomed to answer
such importunities. "If you are just looking for a place to boil out
the poison, hunt around a little--take a wide-eyed look or two! There
are lots and lots of them. This isn't a turkish bath; it's a
gymnasium--a _man's_ gymnasium!"

That was his invariable formula, alike to the objections of the
youthful, unlimited-of-allowance, more or less hard-living sons that
it "spoils the best part of the week, you know, Flash, just running
'way down here," and the equally earnest and far more peevish
complaints of the ticker tired, just-a-minute-to-spare fathers that it
cost them about five thousand, just to take an hour to work off a few
pounds.

But they kept on coming, in spite of their lack of time and Hogarty's
calm refusal to consider their arguments--some of the younger men
because they really did appreciate the sensation of flexible muscles
sliding beneath a smooth skin, some of them merely because they liked
to hear Hogarty's fluently picturesque profanity, always couched in
the most delightfully modulated of English, when the activity of a
particularly giddy week-end brought them back a little too shaky of
hand, a little too brilliant of eye and a trifle jumpy as to pulse.
Hogarty had a way of telling them just how little they actually
amounted to, which, no matter how wickedly it cut, never failed to
amuse them.

The older generation dared do nothing else, even in the face of the
ex-lightweight's scathingly sarcastic admiration of their constantly
increasing waist-line--or lack of one. For their lines were largely a
series of curves exactly opposite to those on which Nature had
originally designed them.

They continued to come; they ran down-town in closed town cars, padded
heavily across the sidewalk like sad bovines going to the slaughte