The Melting of Molly | Page 2

about it; but I ought not to have been agitated enough to let him take the letter right out of my hand and read it.
"So after ten years Alfred Bennett is coming back to offer his bachelor's-buttons to you, Mrs. Molly?" he said in the voice he always uses when he makes fun of Billy and me, and which never fails to make us both mad.
I didn't look at him directly, but I felt his hand shake with the letter in it.
"Not ten, only _eight!_ He went away when I was seventeen," I answered with dignity, wishing I dared be snappy at him: though I never am.
"And after eight years he wants to come back and find you squeezed into a twenty-inch waist, blue muslin rag you wore at parting? No wonder Alfred didn't succeed as a bank clerk, but had to make his hit in the colonies. He's such a big gun that it is a pity he had to return to his native heath and find even such a slight disappointment as a one-yard waist measure around his--his--"
"Oh, it's not, it's not that much," I fairly gasped and I couldn't help the tears coming into my eyes. I have never said much about it, but nobody knows how it hurts me to be as--large as I am. Just writing it down in a book mortifies me dreadfully. It's been coming on worse and worse every year since I married. Poor Mr. Carter had a very good appetite, and I don't know why I should have felt that I had to eat so much every day to keep him company; I wasn't always so considerate about him. Then he didn't want me to go for long walks with the dogs any more, because married women oughtn't to, or ride horseback either--no amusement left but himself; and--and--I just couldn't help the tears coming and dripping as I thought about it all and that awful waist measure in inches.
"Stop crying this minute, Molly," said Dr. John suddenly in the deep voice he uses to Billy and me when we are really ill or tired. "You know I was only teasing you and I won't let you--"
But I sobbed some more. I like him when his eyes come out from under his bushy brows and are all tender and full of sorry for us.
"I can't help it," I gulped in my sleeve. "I did use to like Alfred Bennett. My heart almost broke when he went away. I used to be beautiful and slim, and now I feel as if my own fat ghost has come to haunt me all my life. I am so ashamed! If a woman can't cry over her own dead beauty, what can she cry over?" By this time I was really crying.
Then what happened to me was that Dr. John took me by the shoulders and gave me one good shake.
"You foolish child," he said in the deepest voice I almost ever heard him use. "You are just a lovely perfect flower, but if you will be happier to have Alfred Bennett come and find you as slim as a scarlet runner, I can show you how to do it. Will you do just as I tell you?"
"Yes, I will," I sniffed in a comforted voice. What woman wouldn't be comforted by being called a "perfect flower"? I looked out between my fingers to see what more he was going to say, but he had turned to a shelf and taken down two books.
"Now," he said in his most businesslike voice, as cool as a bucket of water fresh from the spring, "it is no trouble at all to take off your surplus avoirdupois at the rate of two and a half pounds a week if you follow these directions. As I take it, you are about twenty-five pounds over your normal weight. It will take over two months to reduce you, and we will allow an extra month for further beautifying, so that when Mr. Bennett arrives he will find the lady of his adoration in proper trim to be adored. Yes, just be still until I write these directions in this little red leather blank-book for you, and every day I want you to keep an exact record of the conditions of which I make note. No, don't talk while I make out these diet lists! I wish you would go upstairs and see if you don't think we ought to get Billy a thinner set of nightgowns. It seems to me he must be too warm in the ones he is wearing."
When he speaks to me in that tone of voice I always do it. And I needed Billy badly at that very moment. I took him out of his little cot by