vice,
and was as set in his ways as a chunk of concrete.

And his fads did not stop with his food; they extended to his
clothes--everything he used, in fact. His baggy knickerbockers ended in
leather leggins to protect his pipe-stem shanks; his shirts buttoned
all the way down in front and went on like a coat; he wore health
flannels by day and a health shirt at night ("Just like my old Aunt
Margaret's wrapper," whispered Marny in a stage voice to Pudfut);
sported a ninety-nine-cent silver watch fastened to a leather strap
(sometimes to a piece of twine); stuck a five-hundred-dollar scarab pin
in his necktie--"Nothing finer in the Boston Museum," he maintained,
and told the truth--and ever and always enunciated an English so pure
and so undefiled that Stebbins, after listening to it for a few
minutes, proposed, with an irreverence born of good-fellowship, that a
subscription be started to have Joplin's dialect phonographed so that
it might be handed down to posterity as the only real and correct thing.

"Are you noticing, gentlemen, the way in which Joplin handles his
mother tongue?" Stebbins had shouted across the table: "never drops his
'g's,' never slights his first syllable; says 'HUmor' with an accent on
the 'HU.' But for the fact that he pronounces 'bonnet' 'BUNNIT' and
'admires' a thing when he really ought only to 'like' it, you could
never discover his codfish bringing up. Out with your wallets--how much
do you chip in?"

These peculiarities soon made Joplin the storm-centre of every
discussion. Not only were his views on nutrition ridiculed, but all his
fads were treated with equal disrespect. "Impressionism," "plein air,"
the old "line engraving" in contrast to the modern "half-tone"
methods--any opinion of Joplin's, no matter how sane or logical, was
jostled, sat on, punched in the ribs and otherwise maltreated until
every man was breathless or black in the face with assumed rage--every
man except the man jostled, who never lost his temper no matter what
the provocation, and who always came up smiling with some such remark
as: "Smite away, you Pharisees; harmony is heavenly--but stupid. Keep
it up--here's the other cheek!"

On this particular night Joplin, as I have said, had broken out on
diet. Some movement of Marny's connected with the temporary relief of
the lower button of his waistcoat had excited the great Bostonian's
wrath. The men were seated at dinner inside the coffee-room, Johann and
Tine se