‘You are getting fat!’ he said, ‘you are getting self-indulgent; you want whipping!’ And so saying he let out at himself two or three quite hard flicks with the towel--flicks that hurt. It was a new invention for the establishment of pleasant relations between his comic and his moral sense; and when occasion required he repeated it. That little bit of self-discipline always restored his self-esteem, leaving his conscience without a wound; and he would come out of the bathroom feeling as good as gold, and sometimes would even remark to his wife how fresh a really cold bath on a frosty morning made one feel. And she would assent quite pleasantly, only begging him not to overdo it; whereupon he would explain how constant habit hardens a man even to the extremities of water from an iced cistern. And who, to look at her, would have any suspicion that she did not entirely believe him? But on more than one occasion on very cold mornings, when Mr. Trimblerigg was safely downstairs, I have seen her go into the bathroom and inspect, with a woman’s eye for details: appraise the amount of moisture left in the towel, and various other minute points for the confirmation of her hope that he was not overdoing it. And when she has quite satisfied herself, I have seen her smile and go on down to breakfast, a good contented soul, full of the comfortable assurances wives often have, that though husbands may be clever in their way, to see through them domestically is not difficult. Later on, when Mr. Trimblerigg moved to a house efficiently supplied with a hot-water system, his baths were taken daily, but they were not always cold ones; and though he still pretended that they were, the modifications were so various and so habitual, that he left off saying ‘naughty boy!’ when he looked at himself in the glass. Also, when he really did begin to become chubby he left off telling himself that he was getting fat. Sometimes he would look at himself a little sadly, and in order to avoid the moral conclusion that you cannot have the fat things of life without the adipose tissue, preferred to reflect that he was ‘getting middle-aged,’ which was still ten years away from the truth. But the sadness was only momentary; he had so good an opinion of himself that he was almost always cheerful, and easy to get on with. And if after he had turned thirty he did begin to become a little ball of a man, he kept the ball rolling with energy. The amount of work he could do, and do happily, was phenomenal; and under his stimulus the foreign mission work of the Free Evangelicals grew and flourished. CHAPTER THIRTEEN _A Virtuous Adventure_