Mrs. Aldis—thus runs the poem—had a manicurist who was “a great big lummox of a girl—a continent,” with “silly bulging cheeks and puffy forehead,” and who one day said to the poetess, weeping and distraught: “I’m so fat, so awful, awful fat! The boys won’t look at me.” She asked Mrs. Aldis for help and Mrs. Aldis suggested, “A doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise,” and “Ellie and her woes passed from my mind. Until, as summer dawned again, I heard that she was dead.” Mrs. Aldis went to the funeral and saw Ellie lying in her coffin and was told by Ellie’s mother, “She must a made it [the dress] by herself. It’s queer it fitted perfectly, An’ her all thin like that.” Later in the evening Mrs. Aldis received the following confidences from Ellie’s mother: “’Twas the stuff she took that did it, I never knew till after she was dead. The bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em, All labelled ‘Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.’” To sermonize here, we have Mrs. Aldis, who we know to be a highly intelligent woman and one not only interested in the uplift of the drama but also in the uplift of the common (?) people, merely saying to a girl, who is wretchedly unhappy about her elephantine size: All that I can give you is a doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise. She might have given her Vance Thompson’s epoch-making book “Eat and Grow Thin,” or read chapters from it to the unhappy girl, thereby convincing her that starvation is unnecessary and also a patent medicine. But with a coldness that is most reprehensive, she gave “a doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise,” and evidently Ellie would none of this. She might also have consulted the hundred and one doctors in Chicago or elsewhere who specialize in the reduction of fat, and who could have given her for “the continent” a diet chart or perhaps a pill to effect the desired change. But she did not think this necessary; she did not feel it her duty. But if we have only adverse criticism for Mrs. Aldis’ uncharitable act, what direful words of commination should we not visit on the doctor who gave the “vague advice.” In an age when the cult of slimness is uppermost in everybody’s mind, is it possible that the doctor consulted by Mrs. Aldis was so untrue to his mission as a public benefactor that he gave only “vague advice,” or is Mrs. Aldis maligning the whole medical profession and trying to show that by his “vague advice” the doctor was really responsible for Ellie’s death by driving her into taking “the bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em. All labelled ‘Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure Warranted Safe and Rapid.’”?