‘And I am to observe no regularity, as to hours?’

’When you are conquering a bad appetite—­no.  After it is conquered, regularity is no harm, so long as the appetite remains good.  As soon as the appetite wavers, apply the corrective again—­which is starvation, long or short according to the needs of the case.’

‘The best diet, I suppose—­I mean the wholesomest—­’

’All diets are wholesome.  Some are wholesomer than others, but all the ordinary diets are wholesome enough for the people who use them.  Whether the food be fine or coarse it will taste good and it will nourish if a watch be kept upon the appetite and a little starvation introduced every time it weakens.  Nansen was used to fine fare, but when his meals were restricted to bear-meat months at a time he suffered no damage and no discomfort, because his appetite was kept at par through the difficulty of getting his bear-meat regularly.’

’But doctors arrange carefully considered and delicate diets for invalids.’

’They can’t help it.  The invalid is full of inherited superstitions and won’t starve himself.  He believes it would certainly kill him.’

‘It would weaken him, wouldn’t it?’

’Nothing to hurt.  Look at the invalids in our shipwreck.  They lived fifteen days on pinches of raw ham, a suck at sailor-boots, and general starvation.  It weakened them, but it didn’t hurt them.  It put them in fine shape to eat heartily of hearty food and build themselves up to a condition of robust health.  But they did not know enough to profit by that; they lost their opportunity; they remained invalids; it served them right.  Do you know the trick that the health-resort doctors play?’

‘What is it?’

’My system disguised—­covert starvation.  Grape-cure, bath-cure, mud-cure—­it is all the same.  The grape and the bath and the mud make a show and do a trifle of the work—­the real work is done by the surreptitious starvation.  The patient accustomed to four meals and late hours—­at both ends of the day—­now consider what he has to do at a health resort.  He gets up at 6 in the morning.  Eats one egg.  Tramps up and down a promenade two hours with the other fools.  Eats a butterfly.  Slowly drinks a glass of filtered sewage that smells like a buzzard’s breath.  Promenades another two hours, but alone; if you speak to him he says anxiously, “My water!—­I am walking off my water!—­please don’t interrupt,” and goes stumping along again.  Eats a candied roseleaf.  Lies at rest in the silence and solitude of his room for hours; mustn’t read, mustn’t smoke.  The doctor comes and feels of his heart, now, and his pulse, and thumps his breast and his back and his stomach, and listens for results through a penny flageolet; then orders the man’s bath—­half a degree, Reaumur, cooler than yesterday.  After the bath another egg.  A glass of sewage at three or four in the afternoon, and promenade solemnly with the other freaks.  Dinner at 6—­half a doughnut and a cup of tea.  Walk again.  Half-past 8, supper—­more butterfly; at 9, to bed.  Six weeks of this regime—­think of it.  It starves a man out and puts him in splendid condition.  It would have the same effect in London, New York, Jericho—­anywhere.’