"I feel I could
just eat one--a plump one."
There is a man I know. I confess he irritates me. His argument is
that you should always rise from a meal feeling hungry. As I once
explained to him, you cannot rise from a meal feeling hungry without
sitting down to a meal feeling hungry; which means, of course, that
you are always hungry. He agreed with me. He said that was the
idea--always ready.
"Most people," he said, "rise from a meal feeling no more interest in
their food. That was a mental attitude injurious to digestion. Keep
it always interested; that was the proper way to treat it."
"By 'it' you mean . . . ?" I said.
"Of course," he answered; "I'm talking about it."
"Now I myself;" he explained--"I rise from breakfast feeling eager
for my lunch. I get up from my lunch looking forward to my dinner.
I go to bed just ready for my breakfast."
Cheerful expectancy, he said, was a wonderful aid to digestion. "I
call myself;" he said, "a cheerful feeder."
"You don't seem to me," I said, "to be anything else. You talk like
a tadpole. Haven't you any other interest in life? What about home,
and patriotism, and Shakespeare--all those sort of things? Why not
give it a square meal, and silence it for an hour or two; leave
yourself free to think of something else."
"How can you think of anything," he argued, "when your stomach's out
of order?"
"How can you think of anything," I argued, "when it takes you all
your time to keep it in order? You are not a man; you are a nurse to
your own stomach.
Pages:
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133