And yet, despite these struggles and self-denials, it must be told that Margaret Ellis and Lorania Hopkins were little thinner for their warfare. Still, as Shuey Cardigan, the trainer, told Mrs. Ellis, there was no knowing what they might have weighed had they not struggled.
"It ain't only the fat that's on ye, moind ye," says Shuey, with a confidential sympathy of mien; '"it's what ye'd naturally be getting in addition. And first ye've got to peel off that, and then ye come down to the other."
Shuey was so much the most successful of Mrs. Ellis' reducers that his words were weighty. And when at last Shuey said, "I got what you need," Mrs. Ellis listened. "You need a bike, no less," says Shuey.
"But I never could ride one!" said Margaret, opening her pretty brown eyes and wrinkling her Grecian forehead.
"You'd ride in six lessons," pronounced Shuey.
"But how would I look, Cardigan?"
"You'd look noble, ma'am!"
"What do you consider the best wheel, Cardigan?"
Fear of being accused of advertising prevents my giving Cardigan's answer; it is enough that the wheel glittered at Mrs. Ellis' door the very next day, and that a large pasteboard box was delivered by the expressman the very next week. He went on to Miss Hopkins', and delivered the twin of the box, with a similar yellow printed card bearing the impress of the same great firm on the inside of the box cover. For Margaret had hied her to Lorania Hopkins the instant Shuey was gone. She presented herself breathless, a little to the embarrassment of Lorania, who was sitting with her niece before a large box of cracker-jack.
"It's a new kind of candy; I was just tasting it, Maggie," faltered she, while the niece, a girl of nineteen, with the inhuman spirits of her age, laughed aloud.