ed, or deliciously curved, but FAT. She
bulges in all the wrong places, including her chin. (Sister, who has a
way of snooping over my desk in my absence, says that I may as well drop
this now, because nobody would ever read it, anyway, least of all any
sane editor. I protest when I discover that Sis has been over my papers.
It bothers me. But she says you have to do these things when you have a
genius in the house, and cites the case of Kipling's "Recessional," which
was rescued from the depths of his wastebasket by his wife.)

Pearlie Schultz used to sit on the front porch summer evenings and watch
the couples stroll by, and weep in her heart. A fat girl with a fat
girl's soul is a comedy. But a fat girl with a thin girl's soul is a
tragedy. Pearlie, in spite of her two hundred pounds, had the soul of a
willow wand.

The walk in front of Pearlie's house was guarded by a row of big trees
that cast kindly shadows. The strolling couples used to step gratefully
into the embrace of these shadows, and from them into other embraces.
Pearlie, sitting on the porch, could see them dimly, although they could
not see her. She could not help remarking that these strolling couples
were strangely lacking in sprightly conversation. Their remarks were but
fragmentary, disjointed affairs, spoken in low tones with a queer,
tremulous note in them. When they reached the deepest, blackest,
kindliest shadow, which fell just before the end of the row of trees, the
strolling couples almost always stopped, and then there came a quick
movement, and a little smothered cry from the girl, and then a sound, and
then a silence. Pearlie, sitting alone on the porch in the dark,
listened to these things and blushed furiously. Pearlie had never
strolled into the kindly shadows with a little beating of the heart, and
she had never been surprised with a quick arm about her and eager lips
pressed warmly against her own.

In the daytime Pearlie worked as public stenographer at the Burke Hotel.
She rose at seven in the morning, and rolled for fifteen minutes, and lay
on her back and elevated her heels in the air, and stood stiff-kneed
while she touched the floor with her finger tips one hundred times, and
went without her breakfast. At the end of each month she usually found
that she weighed three pounds more than she had the month before.

The folks at home never joked with Pearlie about her weight. Even one's
family has some respect for a