Getting fat is a fault; except when caused by the disease known as obesity, it is a bad habit.  Getting thin and at the same time retaining one’s health is a virtue.  Never does the reductionist feel quite so virtuous as when for the first time, perhaps in decades, he can stand straight up and look straight down and behold the tips of his toes.  His virtue is all the more pleasant to him because it recalls a reformation on his part and because it has called for self-denial.  I started to say that it had called for mortification of the flesh, but I shan’t.  Despite the contrary opinions of the early fathers of the church, I hold that the mortification of the flesh is really based upon the flesh itself, where there is too much of it for beauty and grace, not merely upon the process employed in getting rid of it.

Ask any fat man—­or better still, any formerly fat man—­if I am not correct.  But do not ask a fat woman unless, as in the case of possible fire at a theater, you already have looked about you and chosen the nearest exit.  Taken as a sex, women are more likely to be touchy upon this detail where it applies to themselves than men are.

I have a notion that probably the late Lucrezia Borgia did not start feeding her house guests on those deep-dish poison pies with which her name historically is associated until after she grew sensitive about the way folks dropping in at the Borgia home for a visit were sizing up her proportions on the bias, so to speak.  And I attribute the development of the less pleasant side of Cleopatra’s disposition—­keeping asps around the house and stabbing the bearers of unpleasant tidings with daggers and feeding people to the crocodiles and all that sort of thing—­to the period when she found her anklets binding uncomfortably and along toward half past ten o’clock of an evening was seized by a well-nigh uncontrollable longing to excuse herself from the company and run upstairs and take off her jeweled stomacher and things and slip into something loose.

[Illustration:  “64 BROAD.”]

But upon this subject men are less inclined to be fussy, and by the same token more inclined, on having accomplished a cure, to take a justifiable pride in it and to brag publicly about it.  As I stated a moment ago, I claim Mr. Blythe viewed the matter in a proper and commendable light when he took pen in hand to describe more or less at length his reduction processes.  So, too, did that other notable of the literary world, Mr. Vance Thompson.  Mr. Thompson would be the last one to deny that once upon a time he undeniably was large.  The first time I ever saw him—­it was in Paris some years ago, and he was walking away from me and had his back to me and was wearing a box coat—­I thought for a moment they were taking a tractor across town.  All that, however, belongs to the past.  Just so soon as Mr. Thompson had worked out a system of dieting and by personal application had proved its success he wrote the volume Eat and Grow Thin, embodying therein his experiences, his course of treatment and his advice to former fellow sufferers.  So you see in saying now what I mean to say I do but follow in the mouth-prints of the famous.