Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 6).djvu/215

ES, sir," continued the doorkeeper; "Fat Women are more sentimental than any other women. The fatter they are the more they fall in love. Though, to tell the truth, the most sentimental Fat Woman I ever had wasn't by any means the fattest. She only weighed two hundred and eighty pounds when she came to me, and I lost her when she had just got up to three hundred and forty; and very sorry I was to lose her, for she had a great future before her if she had only been willing to stick to business and had kept up her pride in her profession.

"For the first six months I had her I thought she was a jewel. She never took the least bit of exercise, and she dieted as carefully as if she had been a dyspeptic with a stomach in ruins, who was trying to put himself to rights again by eating nothing but the most disagreeable kinds of food. By the way, did you ever notice that the only way to get even with a stomach that has once gone back on you is to starve it, or give it nothing that any rational stomach likes? The minute you The minute you begin to treat a stomach kindly, and let it have the sort of meat and drink it wants, that minute you are on the road to dyspepsia. A stomach is just like a small boy—you'll spoil it if you ever let it have its own way.

"I hadn't had this Fat Woman a week when I saw that she was as bad as all the rest of them, so far as falling in love goes. Our Giant was taken with the scarlet fever, which was a most ridiculous sort of disease for a man of six feet and a half high, and mighty sick he was. Of course, I couldn't send him to a hospital, where everybody could see him, without destroying his market value, so he had to be nursed in his room at the Museum. Nobody was willing to nurse him till the Fat Woman came forward and said that she would nurse the poor man if everybody else was afraid. Naturally, everybody applauded her bravery, as everybody always does when a person undertakes to do something that other people are afraid to do, and are glad to get rid of doing. I didn't altogether like the idea of temporarily losing the services of the Fat Woman as well as the Giant, but I like to let my people have all the pleasure they can, so I told the Fat Woman to go ahead, and I would pay her half her salary while she was off duty.

"Of course, the Fat Woman fell in love with the Giant before she had been twenty-four hours in the sick room, but I will say that she made a first-class nurse. There was no walking around the room, and knocking over bottles, and putting the furniture in order, and sweeping the floor up, as is always going on when you have an ordinary-sized nurse. The Fat Woman spent the whole day and night sitting in her chair, except when the Giant wanted his medicine, or when he tried to get up, being delirious, and go on the platform in his nightshirt. Whenever this fit was on him, the Fat Woman would just lean her weight on him till he quieted down.

"Once she accidentally leaned a little too much on his chest, and the man was pretty