Visionaries by James Huneker
page 125 of 289 (43%)
page 125 of 289 (43%)
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dazzling teeth. It was an impression sufficiently powerful to keep him
company all the forenoon. Fat men, he reasoned on the steep pass that conducts to the Café Forstwarte, are always sentimental, by no means always amiable, and, as a rule, subject to sudden fancies. Ten years of his sentimental education had been sown with adventures that had begun well, caprices that had no satisfactory endings. He had fallen in love with the girl who played Chopin on the piano, the girl who played Mendelssohn on the violin, the girl who played Goltermann on the violoncello. Then followed girls who painted, poetized, botanized, and hammered metal. Once--an exception--he had succumbed to the charms of an actress who essayed characters in the dumps--Ibsen soubrettes, Strindberg servants, and Máxim Górky tramps. Yet he had, somehow or other, emerged heart whole from his adventures among those masterpieces of the cosmos--women. Certainly this might be another romance added to the long list of his sentimental fractures. He ate his dinner, the one satisfactory meal of the day allowed him by a cruel doctor, with the utmost deliberation. He had walked three hours during the morning, and now, under the spacious balconies of the Forstwarte, he knew that his beef and spinach would be none the worse for a small bottle of very dry, light Vöslauer. Besides, his physician had not actually forbidden him a little liquid at the midday meal. Just before bedtime he was entitled--so his dietetic schedule told him--to one glass of Pilsner beer. Not so bad, after all, this banting at Marienbad, he reflected. Anyhow, it was better than the existence of those fellows at sea-shore and mountain, who gorged and guzzled their summer away. Then he tried to remember among his London club friends any who were as heavy as he, but he could not. Idly smoking, he regarded the piazzas, with their tables and groups of obese humanity, eating, drinking, and buzzing--little fat flies, he thought, |
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