He gave way to a sudden burst of passion. “What the goodness am I to DO?” he said.
“There's one thing pretty evident,” I said, “that you mustn't do. If you go out of doors, you'll go up and up.” I waved an arm upward. “They'd have to send Santos-Dumont after you to bring you down again.”
“I suppose it will wear off?”
I shook my head. “I don't think you can count on that,” I said.
And then there was another burst of passion, and he kicked out at adjacent chairs and banged the floor. He behaved just as I should have expected a great, fat, self-indulgent man to behave under trying circumstances—that is to say, very badly. He spoke of me and my great-grandmother with an utter want of discretion.
“I never asked you to take the stuff,” I said.
And generously disregarding the insults he was putting upon me, I sat down in his armchair and began to talk to him in a sober, friendly fashion.
I pointed out to him that this was a trouble he had brought upon himself, and that it had almost an air of poetical justice. He had eaten too much. This he disputed, and for a time we argued the point.
He became noisy and violent, so I desisted from this aspect of his lesson. “And then,” said I, “you committed the sin of euphuism. You called it not Fat, which is just and inglorious, but Weight. You—”
He interrupted to say he recognised all that. What was he to DO?