“But I never could ride one!” said Margaret, opening her pretty brown eyes and wrinkling her Grecian forehead.

“You’d ride in six lessons.”

“But how would I look, Cardigan?”

“You’d look noble, ma’am!”

“What do you consider the best wheel, Cardigan?”

The advertising rules of magazines prevent my giving Cardigan’s answer; it is enough that the wheel glittered at Mrs. Ellis’s door the very next day, and that a large pasteboard box was delivered by the expressman the very next week.  He went on to Miss Hopkins’s, and delivered the twin of the box, with a similar yellow printed card bearing the impress of the same great firm on the inside of the box cover.

For Margaret had hied her to Lorania Hopkins the instant Shuey was gone.  She presented herself breathless, a little to the embarrassment of Lorania, who was sitting with her niece before a large box of cracker-jack.

“It’s a new kind of candy; I was just tasting it, Maggie,” faltered she, while the niece, a girl of nineteen, with the inhuman spirits of her age, laughed aloud.

“You needn’t mind me,” said Mrs. Ellis, cheerfully; “I’m eating potatoes now!”

“Oh, Maggie!” Miss Hopkins breathed the words between envy and disapproval.

Mrs. Ellis tossed her brown head airily, not a whit abashed.  “And I had beer for luncheon, and I’m going to have champagne for dinner.”

“Maggie, how do you dare?  Did they—­did they taste good?”

“They tasted heavenly, Lorania.  Pass me the candy.  I am going to try something new—­the thinningest thing there is.  I read in the paper of one woman who lost forty pounds in three months, and is losing still!”

“If it is obesity pills, I—­”

“It isn’t; it’s a bicycle.  Lorania, you and I must ride!  Sibyl Hopkins, you heartless child, what are you laughing at?”

Lorania rose; in the glass over the mantel her figure returned her gaze.  There was no mistake (except that, as is often the case with stout people, that glass always increased her size), she was a stout lady.  She was taller than the average of women, and well proportioned, and still light on her feet; but she could not blink away the records; she was heavy on the scales.  Did she stand looking at herself squarely, her form was shapely enough, although larger than she could wish; but the full force of the revelation fell when she allowed herself a profile view, she having what is called “a round waist,” and being almost as large one way as another.  Yet Lorania was only thirty-three years old, and was of no mind to retire from society, and have a special phaeton built for her use, and hear from her mother’s friends how much her mother weighed before her death.

“How should I look on a wheel?” she asked, even as Mrs. Ellis had asked before; and Mrs. Ellis stoutly answered, “You’d look noble!”