"It is no joke," was the indignant comment of Mr. Walker Boggs, as he proceeded to add to his rotundity by devouring the hearty breakfast that the waiter had just brought him. "I am left like a marooned sailor on the sea of life. The only occupation that could have entertained me is gone. It is no time to enter business again, I couldn't have selected a wiser one to leave it. I don't want to marry, once was enough of that. The only women I can attract are those commercially inclined females that any other man could have as well as I. What is the result? My life is ruined. I take no pleasure in anything. I eat, walk about, go to a play, sleep. A pig could do as much; and a pig would not have these memories to haunt him, these recollections of a time so different that I am almost driven wild."
Roseleaf felt a sincere pity for the unfortunate gentleman, and did not see the slightest element of humor in his melancholy recital. But Archie Weil could not be restrained.
"You're right about that pig business," he remarked. "You recall the incident in Mother Goose, where—
'A little pig found a fifty dollar note,
And purchased a hat and a very fine coat.'
"There are strange parallels in history."
Mr. Boggs would have replied to this remark in the terms it deserved had he not been too much engaged at the moment in masticating a particularly fine chop. As it was he growled over the meat like a mastiff in bad humor.
"Are there no remedies for excessive accumulation of fat in the abdominal region?" asked Weil, taking his advantage. "It seems to me I have read advertisements of them in the newspapers."
"Remedies!" retorted the other, having swallowed the food and supplemented it with a glass of ale. "There are a thousand, and I have tried them all. I have taken things by the gross. I have paid money to every quack I could find. For awhile I starved myself so nearly to death that I went to making my will. And every day I grew stouter. I don't know what I measure now, and I don't care. A few fathoms more or less, doesn't count, when one falls from a steamer in midocean."
Mr. Weil took occasion to say that there was no need for this extreme discouragement. A little coin in the hand, or a new diamond ring, would still bring youth and beauty to his disconsolate friend.
"That's just it," retorted Boggs. "It's the contrast that's killing me. The only women who would look at me to-day are mercenary ones that wouldn't care if I was black as Othello or big as George IV. Why, I could show you a trunkful of letters, written me by the finest women in this country, when I was at my best. They breathe but one thing—love, love, love! I lived on it! It was the air that kept my lungs in motion. And I thought to go back to it so easily! Ah!"