food.

Eat what you want. Eat lots of it. Yes, eat too much of
it. Eat till you can just stagger across the room with
it and prop it up against a sofa cushion. Eat everything
that you like until you can't eat any more. The only test
is, can you pay for it? If you can't pay for it, don't
eat it. And listen--don't worry as to whether your food
contains starch, or albumen, or gluten, or nitrogen. If
you are a damn fool enough to want these things, go and
buy them and eat all you want of them. Go to a laundry
and get a bag of starch, and eat your fill of it. Eat
it, and take a good long drink of glue after it, and a
spoonful of Portland cement. That will gluten you, good
and solid.

If you like nitrogen, go and get a druggist to give you
a canful of it at the soda counter, and let you sip it
with a straw. Only don't think that you can mix all these
things up with your food. There isn't any nitrogen or
phosphorus or albumen in ordinary things to eat. In any
decent household all that sort of stuff is washed out in
the kitchen sink before the food is put on the table.

And just one word about fresh air and exercise. Don't
bother with either of them. Get your room full of good
air, then shut up the windows and keep it. It will keep
for years. Anyway, don't keep using your lungs all the
time. Let them rest. As for exercise, if you have to take
it, take it and put up with it. But as long as you have
the price of a hack and can hire other people to play
baseball for you and run races and do gymnastics when
you sit in the shade and smoke and watch them--great
heavens, what more do you want?

How to Avoid Getting Married

Some years ago, when I was the Editor of a Correspondence
Column, I used to receive heart-broken letters from young
men asking for advice and sympathy. They found themselves
the object of marked attentions from girls which they
scarcely knew how to deal with. They did not wish to give
pain or to seem indifferent to a love which they felt
was as ardent as it was disinterested, and yet they felt
that they could not bestow their hands where their hearts
had not spoken. They wrote to me fully and frankly, and
as one soul might write to another for relief. I accepted
their confidences as under the pledge of a secrecy, never
divulging their disclosures beyond the circulation of my
newspapers, or giving any hint of their identity other
than printing their names and addresses and their letters
in full.