sn't_," Nancy said, "except technically."

"You can't eat it and grow thin."

"You can't eat it and grow _fat_ unless it happens to be the peculiar
food to which you are idiosyncratic."

"If that's really a word," Billy said, "I'll overlook your trying it
out on me. If it isn't you'll have to take the consequences." He went
through the pantomime of one preparing to do physical violence.

"Oh! it's a word. Ask Caroline." Nancy's eyes still held their look of
being focussed on something in the remote distance. "The trouble with
all this dietetic problem is that the individual is dependent on
something more than an adjustment of values. His environment and his
heredity play an active part in his diet problem. Some people can eat
highly concentrated food, others have to have bulk, and so on. You
can't substitute cheese and bananas for steak and do the race a
service no matter what the cost of steak may soar to. You can't even
substitute rice for potatoes."

"Not unless your patronage is more Oriental than Celtic."

"Healthy people have to have honest fare of about the type to
which their environment has accustomed them, but intelligently
supervised,--that's the conclusion I've come to."

"You may be right," Billy said, "my general notion has always been
that everybody ate wrong, and that everybody who would stand for it
ought to be started all over again. I wouldn't stand for it, so I've
never looked into the matter."

"People don't eat wrong, that's the really startling discovery I've
made recently. I mean healthy people don't."

"I don't believe it," said Billy; "the way people eat is one of the
most outrageous of the human scandals. I read the newspapers."

"The newspapers don't know," Nancy said; "the individual usually has
an instinctive working knowledge of the diet that is good for him, and
his digestional experiences have taught him how to regulate it to some
extent."

"How do you account for the clerk that orders coffee and sinkers at
Child's every day?"

"That's exactly it," Nancy said. "He knows that he needs bulk and
stimulation. He's handicapped by his poverty, but he gets the nearest
substitute for the diet that suits him that he can get. If he could
afford it he would have a square meal that would nourish him as well
as warm and fill him."

"I don't see but what this interesting theory lets you out altogether.
Why Outside Inn, with its foxy table d'hote, if what's one man's meat
is another ma