But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.
"I expect," he said, "you take no more exercise than I do, and
probably you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese people
he fancied he ate nothing.) "Yet,"--and he smiled an oblique smile--
"we differ."
And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness;
all he did for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness;
what people had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had
heard of people doing for fatness similar to his. "A priori," he said,
"one would think a question of nutrition could be answered by dietary
and a question of assimilation by drugs." It was stifling. It was
dumpling talk. It made me feel swelled to hear him.
One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time
came when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether
too conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room but
he would come wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and
gormandised round and about me while I had my lunch. He seemed
at times almost to be clinging to me. He was a bore, but not so
fearful a bore as to be limited to me; and from the first there
was something in his manner--almost as though he knew, almost as
though he penetrated to the fact that I MIGHT--that there was a remote,
exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.
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