However, I can see some good coming out of my unavoidably acquired knowledge of female attire.  In future days, while my wife is out purchasing shirts and neckties for me, I can easily employ my time to advantage in shopping around Fifth Avenue in search of the correct thing in lingerie for her.  It will be a great help to the household and I am sure impress my wife with the depth and range of my education, which I will be able to tell her, thank God, was innocently acquired.

May 28th. I am slowly forming back into my pristine shape but only after having been freed from bondage for some hours.  After several more sodas, concoctions which up till recently I have despised as injurious, I guess I will have filled out to my usual dimensions around the waist line, but when I consider the long days of womanhood stretched out before me in the future I will admit it is with a sinking not only of the waist, but also of the heart.

More indignities have been heaped upon me.  Why did I ever take up the profession of a show girl?  To-day I fell into the clutches of the barbers.  They were not gentle clutches, brutal rather; and such an outspoken lot they were at that.

“What’s that?” asked one of them as I stood rather nervously before him with bared chest.

“Why, that,” I replied, a trifle disconcerted, “that’s my chest.”

He looked at me for a moment, then smiled a slow, pitying smile.  “Hey, Tony,” he suddenly called to his colleague, “come over here a moment and see what this bird claims to be a chest.”

All this yelled in the faces of the entire Biff-Bang company.  It was more inhuman and debasing than my first physical examination in public.  The doctors on this occasion, although they had not complimented me, had at least been comparatively impersonal in despatching their offices, but these men were far from being impersonal.  I perceived with horror that it was their intention to use my chest as a means of bringing humor into their drab existences.  Tony came and surveyed me critically.

“That,” he drawled musically, “ees not a chest.  That ees the bottom part of hees neck.”

“I know it is,” replied the other, “but somehow his arms have gotten mixed up in the middle of it.”

Tony shrugged his shoulders eloquently.  He assumed the appearance of a man completely baffled.

“Honestly, now, young feller,” continued my first tormentor, “are you serious when you try to tell us that that is your chest?”

He drew attention to the highly disputed territory by poking me diligently with his thumb.

“That’s the part the doctor always listened to whenever I had a cold,” I replied as indifferently as possible.  The man pondered over this for a moment.

“Well,” he replied at length, “probably the doctor was right, but to the impartial observer it would seem to be, as my friend Tony so accurately observed, the bottom part of your neck.”