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.