The Slim Princess

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The Slim Princess

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Title: The Slim Princess
Author: George Ade
Release Date: February 25, 2004 [EBook #11279]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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PRINCESS ***

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[Illustration: I consented to deliver a message for him]

THE SLIM PRINCESS
* * * * *
By GEORGE ADE
1907
* * * * *
"The Slim Princess" has been elaborated and rewritten from a story
printed in The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia late in 1906 and
copyright, 1906, by the Curtis Publishing Company.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
I WOMAN IN MOROVENIA
II KALORA'S AFFLICTION
III THE CRUELTY OF LAW
IV THE GARDEN PARTY
V HE ARRIVES
VI HE DEPARTS
VII THE ONLY KOLDO
VIII BY MESSENGER
IX AS TO WASHINGTON, D.C.
X ON THE WING
XI AN OUTING--A REUNION

XII THE GOVERNOR CABLES
XIII THE HOME-COMING
XIV HEROISM REWARDED
* * * * *

THE SLIM PRINCESS
* * * * *

I
WOMAN IN MOROVENIA
Morovenia is a state in which both the mosque and the motor-car now
occur in the same landscape. It started out to be Turkish and later
decided to be European.
The Mohammedan sanctuaries with their hideous stencil decorations
and bulbous domes are jostled by many new shops with blinking fronts
and German merchandise. The orthodox turn their faces toward Mecca
while the enlightened dream of a journey to Paris. Men of title lately
have made the pleasing discovery that they may drink champagne and
still be good Mussulmans. The red slipper has been succeeded by the
tan gaiter. The voluminous breeches now acknowledge the superior
graces of intimate English trousers. Frock-coats are more conventional
than beaded jackets. The fez remains as a part of the insignia of the old
faith and hereditary devotion to the Sick Man.
The generation of males which has been extricating itself from the
shackles of Orientalism has not devoted much worry to the Condition
of Woman.
In Morovenia woman is still unliberated. She does not dine at a

palm-garden or hop into a victoria on Thursday afternoon to go to the
meeting of a club organized to propagate cults. If she met a cult face to
face she would not recognize it.
Nor does she suspect, as she sits in her prison apartment, peeping out
through the lattice at the monotonous drift of the street life, that her
sisters in far-away Michigan are organizing and raising missionary
funds in her behalf.
She does not read the dressmaking periodicals. She never heard of the
Wednesday matinée. When she takes the air she rides in a carriage that
has a sheltering hood, and she is veiled up to the eyes, and she must
never lean out to wriggle her little finger-tips at men lolling in front of
the cafés. She must not see the men. She may look at them, but she
must not see them. No wonder the sisters in Michigan are organizing to
batter down the walls of tradition, and bring to her the more recent
privileges of her sex!
Two years ago, when this story had its real beginning, the social status
of woman in Morovenia was not greatly different from what it is to-day,
or what it was two centuries ago.
Woman had two important duties assigned to her. One was to hide
herself from the gaze of the multitude, and the other was to be
beautiful--that is, fat. A woman who was plump, or buxom, or chubby
might be classed as passably attractive, but only the fat women were
irresistible. A woman weighing two hundred pounds was only
two-thirds as beautiful as one weighing three hundred. Those grading
below one hundred and fifty were verging upon the impossible.

II
KALORA'S AFFLICTION
If it had been planned to make this an old-fashioned discursive novel,
say of the Victor Hugo variety, the second chapter would expend itself
upon a philosophical discussion of Fat and a sensational showing of

how and why the presence or absence of adipose tissue, at certain
important crises, had altered the destinies of the whole race.
The subject offers vast possibilities. It involves the physical
attractiveness of every woman in History and permits one to speculate
wildly as to what might have happened if Cleopatra had weighed forty
pounds heavier, if