waste-products which must be eliminated. For a greedy man the situation
was frankly intolerable, for when he continued his ordinary diet (this
was before the cursed advent of the Christian Science cook) she kept
pointing to his well-furnished plate, and told him that every atom of
that beef or mutton and potatoes, turned from the moment he swallowed it
into chromogens and toxins, and that his apparent appetite was merely the
result of fermentation. For herself her platter was an abominable mess
of cheese and protein-powder and apples and salad-oil, while round her,
like saucers of specimen seeds were ranged little piles of nuts and
pine-branches, which supplied body-building material, and which she
weighed out with scrupulous accuracy, in accordance with the directions
of the "Uric Acid Monthly." Tea and coffee were taboo, since they
flooded the blood with purins, and the kitchen boiler rumbled day and
night to supply the rivers of boiling water with which (taken in sips)
she inundated her system. Strange gaunt females used to come down from
London, with small parcels full of tough food that tasted of
travelling-bags and contained so much nutrition that a port-manteau
full of it would furnish the daily rations of any army. Luckily even
her iron constitution could not stand the strain of such ideal living
for long, and her growing anaemia threatened to undermine a
constitution seriously impaired by the precepts of perfect health. A
course of beef-steaks and other substantial viands loaded with uric
acid restored her to her former vigour.

Thus reinforced, she plunged with the same energy as she had devoted to
repelling uric acid into the embrace of Christian Science. The
inhumanity of that sect towards both herself and others took complete
possession of her, and when her husband complained on a bitter January
morning that his smoking-room was like an icehouse, because the
housemaid had forgotten to light the fire, she had no touch of pity for