all alone, wishing I knew more of the members, and suddenly he came,
a great rolling front of chins and abdomina, towards me, and grunted
and sat down in a chair close by me and wheezed for a space,
and scraped for a space with a match and lit a cigar, and then
addressed me. I forget what he said--something about the matches
not lighting properly, and afterwards as he talked he kept stopping
the waiters one by one as they went by, and telling them about
the matches in that thin, fluty voice he has. But, anyhow, it was
in some such way we began our talking.

He talked about various things and came round to games. And thence
to my figure and complexion. "YOU ought to be a good cricketer,"
he said. I suppose I am slender, slender to what some people would
call lean, and I suppose I am rather dark, still--I am not ashamed
of having a Hindu great-grandmother, but, for all that, I don't want
casual strangers to see through me at a glance to HER. So that
I was set against Pyecraft from the beginning.

But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.

"I expect," he said, "you take no more exercise than I do, and
probably you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese people
he fancied he ate nothing.) "Yet,"--and he smiled an oblique smile--
"we differ."

And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness;
all he did for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness;
what people had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had
heard of people doing for fatness similar to his. "A priori," he said,
"one would think a question of nutrition could be answered by dietary