ound to games. And thence to my
figure and complexion. "_You_ ought to be a good cricketer," he said.
I suppose I am slender, slender to what some people would call lean, and I
suppose I am rather dark, still----I am not ashamed of having a Hindu
great-grandmother, but, for all that, I don't want casual strangers to see
through me at a glance to _her_. So that I was set against Pyecraft
from the beginning.

But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.

"I expect," he said, "you take no more exercise than I do, and probably
you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese people he fancied he ate
nothing.) "Yet"--and he smiled an oblique smile--"we differ."

And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness; all he did
for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness; what people
had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had heard of people
doing for fatness similar to his. "_A priori_," he said, "one would
think a question of nutrition could be answered by dietary and a question
of assimilation by drugs." It was stifling. It was dumpling talk. It made
me feel swelled to hear him.

One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time came
when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether too
conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room but he would come
wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and gormandised round and
about me while I had my lunch. He seemed at times almost to be clinging to
me. He was a bore, but not so fearful a bore as to be limited to me and
from the first there was something in his manner--almost as though he
knew, almost as though he penetrated to the fact that I _might_--that
there was a remote, exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.

"I'd give anything to get it down," he would say--"anything," and peer at
me over his vast cheeks and pant. Poor old Pyecraft! He has just gonged;
no doubt to order another buttered teacake!

He came to the actual thing one day. "Our Pharmacopoeia," he said, "our
Western Pharmacopoeia, is anything but the last word of medical science.
In the East, I've been told----"

He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an aquarium.

I was quite suddenly angry with him. "Look here," I said, "who told you
about my great-grandmother's recipes?"

"Well," he fenced.

"Every time we've met for a week," I said--"and we've met pretty often--
you've given me a broad hint or so