The skeleton—­which really does not seem a proper word—­was the dread of growing stout.  They were more afraid of flesh than of sin.  Yet they were both good women.  Mrs. Ellis regularly attended church, and could always be depended on to show hospitality to convention delegates, whether clerical or lay; she was a liberal subscriber to every good work; she was almost the only woman in the church aid society that never lost her temper at the soul-vexing time of the church fair; and she had a larger clientele of regular pensioners than any one in town, unless it were her friend Miss Hopkins, who was “so good to the poor” that never a tramp slighted her kitchen.  Miss Hopkins was as amiable as Mrs. Ellis, and always put her name under that of Mrs. Ellis, with exactly the same amount, on the subscription papers.  She could have given more, for she had the larger income; but she had no desire to outshine her friend, whom she admired as the most charming of women.

Mrs. Ellis, indeed, was agreeable as well as good, and a pretty woman to the bargain, if she did not choose to be weighed before people.  Miss Hopkins often told her that she was not really stout; she merely had a plump, trig little figure.  Miss Hopkins, alas! was really stout.  The two waged a warfare against the flesh equal to the apostle’s in vigor, although so much less deserving of praise.

Mrs. Ellis drove her cook to distraction with divers dieting systems, from Banting’s and Dr. Salisbury’s to the latest exhortations of some unknown newspaper prophet.  She bought elaborate gymnastic appliances, and swung dumb-bells and rode imaginary horses and propelled imaginary boats.  She ran races with a professional trainer, and she studied the principles of Delsarte, and solemnly whirled on one foot and swayed her body and rolled her head and hopped and kicked and genuflected in company with eleven other stout and earnest matrons and one slim and giggling girl who almost choked at every lesson.  In all these exercises Miss Hopkins faithfully kept her company, which was the easier as Miss Hopkins lived in the next house, a conscientious Colonial mansion with all the modern conveniences hidden beneath the old-fashioned pomp.

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’s 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.