'
"I gave an unpremeditated laugh that dwindled to a chuckle, as if it were
produced by a choking process. Two heads appeared a second at the doorway
of the room they had thought empty, and then vanished!
"When I came home I sat a long while before my den fireplace thinking.
They were right in two things, though not in the falling in love--that
was done thirty-five years ago once and for all. I wondered if I had
grown _pudgy_, dreadful word; _stout_ carries a certain dignity, but
pudgy suggests bunchy, wabbling flesh. I've noticed my gloves go on
lingeringly, clinging at the joints, but I read that to mean rheumatism!
"That night I stood before the mirror and studied my face as I unbuttoned
my vest and loosened my shirt band at the neck. Suddenly I experienced
great relief. For several months past I have felt a strange asphyxiation
and a vertigo sensation when wearing formal clothes of any kind, enjoying
complete comfort only in the loose neckcloth and wrapper of my private
hours. I had thought of asking medical advice, but having acquired a
distrust of general physic in my youth, and hoping you might come down, I
put it off.
"Unfasten your own top button, and now prepare to laugh--Martin Cortright
is not threatened with apoplexy or heart failure, he's grown _pudgy_, and
his clothes are all too small! Yet but for that boy's good-tempered
ridicule he might not have discovered it.
"Think of it, Richard! I, whom my mother considered interesting and of
somewhat distinguished mien, owing to my pallor and slim stature! A
pudgy worm belongs to chestnuts, not to books.
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