“Elevators!” Tish went on scornfully.  “Street cars and taxicabs!  No wonder your bodies are mere masses of protoplasm, or cellulose, or whatever it is.”

“Since when,” said Aggie, “have you been walking to develop yourself, Tish?  I must say—­”

Here anger brought on one of her sneezing attacks, and she was unable to finish.

Tish stood before us oracularly.  “After next September,” she said, “you will both scorn the sloth of civilization.  You will move about for the joy of moving about.  You will have cast off the shackles of the flesh and be born anew.  That is, if a plan of mine goes through.  Lizzie, you will lose fifty pounds!”

Well, I didn’t want to lose fifty pounds.  After our summer in the Maine woods I had gone back to find that my new tailor-made coat, which had fitted me exactly, and being stiffened with haircloth kept its shape off and looked as if I myself were hanging to the hook, had caved in on me in several places.  Just as I had gone to the expense of having it taken in I began to put on flesh again, and had to have it let out.  Besides, no woman over forty should ever reduce, at least not violently.  She wrinkles.  My face that summer had fallen into accordion plaits, and I had the curious feeling of having enough skin for two.

Aggie had suggested at that time that I have my cheeks filled out with paraffin, which I believe cakes and gives the appearance of youth.  But Mrs. Ostermaier knew a woman who had done so, and being hit on one side by a snowball, the padding broke in half, one part moving up under her eye and the second lodging at the angle of her jaw.  She tried lying on a hot-water bottle to melt the pieces and bring them together again, but they did not remain fixed, having developed a wandering habit and slipping unexpectedly now and then.  Mrs. Ostermaier says it is painful to watch her holding them in place when she yawns.

Strangely enough, however, a few weeks later Tish’s enthusiasm for the West had apparently vanished.  When several weeks went by and the atlas had disappeared from her table, and she had given up vegetarianism for Swedish movements, we felt that we were to have a quiet summer after all, and Aggie wrote to a hotel in Asbury Park about rooms for July and August.

There was a real change in Tish.  She stopped knitting abdominal bands for the soldiers in Europe, for one thing, although she had sent over almost a dozen very tasty ones.  In the evenings, when we dropped in to chat with her, she said very little and invariably dozed in her chair.

On one such occasion, Aggie having inadvertently stepped on the rocker of her chair while endeavoring by laying a hand on Tish’s brow to discover if she was feverish, the chair tilted back and Tish wakened with a jerk.

She immediately fell to groaning and clasped her hands to the small of her back, quite ignoring poor Aggie, whom the chair had caught in the epigastric region, and who was compelled for some time to struggle for breath.