of youth and
gaiety and charm. It was Ranny's youth and charm and gaiety that made
him so surprising and so unaccountable.

Circumstances were not encouraging to Ranny's youth, nor to his private
and particular ambition, the cultivation of a superb physique. For, not
only was he a little chemist's son, he was a great furniture dealer's
inexpensive and utterly insignificant clerk, one of a dozen confined in
a long mahogany pen where they sat at long mahogany desks, upon high
mahogany stools, making invoices of chairs and tables and wardrobes and
washstands and all manner of furniture. You would never have known, to
see him sitting there, that John Randall Fulleymore Ransome was a leader
in Section I of the London Polytechnic Gymnasium.

So far, in his way, he testified, he bore his torch. Confined as he was
in a mahogany pen, born and brought up in the odor of drugs, and
surrounded by every ignominious sign of disease and infirmity, his dream
was yet of cleanness, of health, and the splendor of physical
perfection. The thing that young Ransome most loathed and abhorred was
Flabbiness, next to Flabbiness, Weediness. The years of his adolescence
were one long struggle and battle against these two. He had them ever
before him, and associated them, absurdly but inveterately, with a
pharmaceutical chemist's occupation; of Weediness his father being the
prime example; while for Flabbiness, young Mercier, his father's
assistant--well, Mercier, as he said, "took the biscuit." It was
horrible for young Ransome to inhabit the same house with young Mercier,
because of his flabbiness.

In all cities there are many thousand Ransomes, more or less confined in
mahogany cages, but John Randall Fulleymore stands for all of them. He
was one of those who, in a cold twilight on a Saturday afternoon,
stagger from the trampled field, hot-eyed under their wild hair, whose
garments are stained from the torn grass and uptrodden earth, with here
and there a rent and the white gleam of a shoulder or a thigh; whose
vivid, virile odor has a tang of earth in it. He is the image and the
type of these forlorn, foredoomed young athletes, these exponents of a
city's desperate adolescence, these inarticulate enthusiasts of the
earth. He bursts from his pen in the evening at seven or half past, he
snatches somewhere a cup of cocoa and a sandwich, and at nine he is
seen, half pagan in his "zephyr" and his "shorts," sprinting like mad
through the main th