“Moreover, she seems to have had some worries about her health. After Leo’s departure, Gertrude moved to another house, on East Eager Street in Baltimore. Emma Lootz, a classmate at Johns Hopkins and a mutual friend of Mabel Weeks, had a room directly below Gertrude’s large living room. She recalled that Gertrude ‘got alarmed’ about the state of her own health, feeling that there was something wrong with her blood. Gertrude prescribed an unusual treatment for herself; she hired a welterweight to box with her. ‘The chandelier in my room used to swing,’ Emma Lootz remembered, ‘and the house echoed with shouts of ‘Now give me one on the jaw! Now give me one in the kidney!’ ”

(James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company, pp. 44–45.)