You have been through a London season? It is a mad chase from food to food. You rise and hastily swallow a heavy English breakfast. You ride in the Row a while, ride toward a lunch table--and an English lunch, especially in the season, means a bigger dinner than any Frenchman or other highly civilized person ever willingly sat down to. Hardly is this long lunch over before it is time for tea--which means not merely tea, but toast, and sandwiches, and hot muffins, and many kinds of heavy cake, and often fruit or jam. Tea is to give you an appetite for the dinner that follows--and what a dinner! One rich, heavy course upon another, with drenchings of wine and a poisonous liqueur afterward. You sit about until this has settled a bit, then--on to supper! Not so formidable a meal as the dinner, but still what any reasonable person would call a square meal. Then to bed? By no means. On to a ball, where you eat and drink in desultory fashion until late supper is served. You roll heavily home to sleep. But hardly have your eyes closed when you are roused to eat again. It is breakfast time, and another day of stuffing has begun. Starvation, they tell me, is one of the regular causes of death in London. But that is in the East End. In the West End--and you, gentle reader, are interested only in that section--death, I’ll wager, reaps twenty from overfeeding to one he gets in the East End through underfeeding. Famine is a dreadful thing. But how characteristic of the shallowness of human beings it is that you can make a poetic horror out of famine, when no one would listen while you told the far more horrible truth of the frightful ravages of overfeeding, chief cause of all the diseases that torture and twist the human body, aging and killing it prematurely. Edna had been for many years most cautiously careful of her health. She loved her youth, her beautiful body. She fought against her natural fondness for food and wine. I fancy that, for this first season after freedom she relaxed her rules, and turned herself loose to “celebrate.” I know she must have had something of this sort in mind, because her French maid--I could not talk with the Italian--told me that madame had arranged an elaborate programme of “cures” on the Continent after the season. “And they were to be serious cures,” said she. Her illness took such a course of ups and downs, with death always hovering, that it was impossible for me to leave. I wrote Mary; I got no reply. I sent Rossiter to Paris; he reported that Mrs. Armstrong and Mrs. Kirkwood had left for the country, but that he could get no address.