“The fat woman that weighs twenty-three stone,” says her husband to the company, “is a cousin of mine twice removed, and I have done a bit in the show line myself. It’s a rum business. Better than working in a brewery stables, though. Me and my mate had to go because we got up so early that we burnt too many candles.”
The mention of the fat woman rouses the labourers, and one says—
“They say them fat women eats hardly anything at all.”
“Very small eater is Daisy. But you see her food does her good. None of it’s wasted.”
“That’s it. Her food agrees with her.”
The wife sighs.
“Now there’s my missus here,” says the husband. “She was one of these pretty gallus dancing-girls who get their fifteen shillings a week. Her food don’t nourish her. Now my brother used to laugh in publics for a pint and he would laugh till they gave him a pint to stop.”
“Oh, I can laugh after a pint,” says the wife, “but then I could just as easy cry, I worries so. There’s many a aching heart goes up and down that Great Western Railway in the express trains.”
“I never worries, missus,” says a labourer with pursy mouth, short pipe, and head straight up behind from his neck.
“Quite right,” says the husband. “My old girl here lives on the fat of the land and is always thin. Her food don’t nourish her. There’s more harm done in the world by a discontented gut than anything else. I think of asking her to try living on her pipe by itself.”