or figure. Yet she had a perfect cure for any tendency to put on weight, a guaranteed recipe for remaining trim and slender,—a recipe which any one of her stout friends at the same club would have given nine-tenths of their fortunes to possess, well knowing that with a figure such as hers they could recover not only the nine-tenths of their own fortune thus surrendered but at least one additional fortune besides, and perhaps more. What this recipe was I shall not disclose. Some day when Lily Leslie is no longer Lily Trevelyan and the stress of poverty is upon her (which God forbid!) she may perforce have need to open a beauty parlor or a perfumery shop on Fifth Avenue or elsewhere and this secret will prove as much her fortune as her face was in her younger days. But do not pray for her downfall, ladies! Perhaps—I do not say it—that secret may be simply that you must be one of those fortunate persons that Heaven intended to be always slender and trim and hipless. If a quarter inch on the end of Cleopatra’s nose would have changed the destinies of Europe, how much of an inch on—well, I shall not go further into this interesting speculation. But I suggest the
