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,