“Yah _suppose_. Grmph!” The exclamation was replete with contempt. “Come into the shop.” She followed him into a big airy room flooded with overhead light, and filled with all sorts of mechanism. Obedient to a gesture she stepped on the scales. Mr. Dunne busied himself with a careful adjustment. “You’ll strip a hunner’n fifty-two,” he declared. Darcy vaguely felt as if she were being accused of murder. She felt even worse when the iron-faced Mr. Dunne made an entry in a little notebook. “Will I?” she said faintly. “Not long,” retorted the trainer. He strode across the room and set foot upon a huge, ungainly leather ball. It seemed but the merest touch that he gave. Nevertheless the ball left that spot hurriedly, rolled across to Darcy and encountered her shins with an impact that all but crumpled her flabby legs beneath her. “Know what that is?” demanded the trainer. “I’m afraid I don’t.” “Medicine-ball. Little pill. You’ll _like_ the little pill.” Prophetic voices within Darcy told her that this was improbable: but she mildly assented. The pulley-weights were next called to her attention and identified. “What do I do with them?” she inquired with a proper show of interest. “Pull ’em up.” “I see. And then what?” “Let ’em down.” It seemed to Darcy a profitless procedure, but she wisely refrained from saying so, and was glad that she did when Mr. Dunne added in a tone which emphasized the importance of the transaction: “A coupla hundred times.” Subsequently the neophyte was introduced to the dumb-bells, the Indian-clubs, the rings, the hand-ball court, the rowing-machine—she earned a glance of contempt by asking where it rowed to—the punching-bag, which she disliked at sight, the finger-grip roller, the stationary bicycle (which also got you nowhere), the boxing-gloves, and a further bewildering but on the whole inspiriting array of machines for making one strong, happy, beautiful, and healthy to order. Somewhere in the girl’s consciousness lurked a suspicion that the apparatus couldn’t be expected to do all the work: that there were patient and perhaps strenuous endeavors expected of the operator. But of the real rigors of the awaiting fate she had but the faintest glimmer. As she was leaving, a door bumped violently open and there appeared in the “shop” a horrific female figure. It was that of a fat blonde with four sweaters on. Her cheeks were puffy red, her eyes jutted poppily from the sockets, and her jowls dripped. As a slave, treading the unending grind of the mill, the apparition set herself to trot heavily around the circumference of the room. And as she ran she blubbered. “Oh, poor thing!” cried Darcy under her breath. “What’s the matter with her?” “Nothin’,” said Mr. Dunne indifferently. “But there must be something,” insisted the newcomer aghast. “Fat,” vouchsafed Mr. Dunne. “They mostly take it hard—at the start,” he condescended to add. “She’s only been at it a month.”