The Ossified Man was in love with the Fat Woman. Such things happen. Men are falling in love with women every day and apparent absurdities and incongruities do not count. Love asks no odds. The Ossified Man was in love with the Fat Lady. She weighed six hundred and eighty-three pounds; he weighed just eighty-three. It may have been that this singular coincidence, as shown on the billboards throughout the city, first drew the two together. Who can tell? They became acquainted and then began one of the love affairs of the thousand myriads, with which the world is at all times occupied. The Fat Lady was fair to look upon. She had the tremendous advantage of being a landscape as well as a personality. She was, somehow, healthy, and her far-outstanding flesh was firm and white, despite her mountainous proportions. She rose and fell rythmatically as a mass with each inhalation of her fortunately great lungs and reminded one, in a way, of a volcano half quiescent. This, though, would be an utterly wrong simile. There was nothing fiery about her. Her round face showed but a somewhat intensified benevolence. Upon second thought--because she had what she deemed taste in dress and wore a variety of outside ribbon things upon her looming corsage and vast flowers upon her hat--she reminded one, billowy and heaving and with green and flowery things atop her, of the ever soft and rolling and lifting Sargasso Sea. She was a good girl in her way and had come from Indiana. The Ossified man was nearly six feet in height, was one of the best known specimens in the show world of what may be called an animated stalactite and could scarcely be called ungraceful though a slightly too robust skeleton. His joints were singularly flexible yet and his digestion and his mind were active. "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Thus he explained the quality of the personality of the two. The wooing of the Ossified Man was in the nature of an innovation. He recognized the attitude in the community occupied by his inamorata and himself, not merely toward each other but with relation to all the outside world, and he conducted himself accordingly.