A Damsel in Distress

We all of us have our prejudices. Maud had a prejudice against fat

men. It may have been the spectacle of her brother Percy, bulging

more and more every year she had known him, that had caused this

kink in her character. At any rate, it existed, and she gazed in

sickened silence at Geoffrey. He had turned again now, and she was

enabled to get a full and complete view of him. He was not merely

stout. He was gross. The slim figure which had haunted her for a

year had spread into a sea of waistcoat. The keen lines of his face

had disappeared altogether. His cheeks were pink jellies.

One of the distressed gentlewomen had approached with a

slow disdain, and was standing by the table, brooding on the

corpse upstairs. It seemed a shame to bother her.

"Tea or chocolate?" she inquired proudly.

"Tea, please," said Maud, finding her voice.

"One tea," sighed the mourner.

"Chocolate for me," said Geoffrey briskly, with the air of one

discoursing on a congenial topic. "I'd like plenty of whipped

cream. And please see that it's hot."

"One chocolate."

Geoffrey pondered. This was no light matter that occupied him.

"And bring some fancy cakes--I like the ones with icing on

them--and some tea-cake and buttered toast. Please see there's

plenty of butter on it."

Maud shivered. This man before her was a man in whose lexicon there

should have been no such word as butter, a man who should have

called for the police had some enemy endeavoured to thrust butter

upon him.

"Well," said Geoffrey leaning forward, as the haughty ministrant

drifted away, "you haven't changed a bit. To look at, I mean."

"No?" said Maud.

"You're just the same. I think I"--he squinted down at his

waistcoat--"have put on a little weight. I don't know if you notice

it?"

Maud shivered again. He thought he had put on a little weight, and

didn't know if she had noticed it! She was oppressed by the eternal

melancholy miracle of the fat man who does not realize that he has

become fat.

"It was living on the yacht that put me a little out of condition,"

said Geoffrey. "I was on the yacht nearly all the time since I saw

you last. The old boy had a Japanese cook and lived pretty high. It

was apoplexy that got him. We had a great time touring about. We

were on the Mediterranean all last winter, mostly at Nice."

"I should like to go to Nice," said Maud, for something to say. She

was feeling that it was not only externally that Geoffrey had

changed. Or had he in reality always been like this, commonplace

and prosaic, and was it merely in her imagination that he had been

wonderful?