and as for auxiliary weapons, what with sharp-edged jet and metal buttons sprouting from one end of the feminine form to the other, up the front, down the back, across the shoulders, along the hips, executing flank movements right and left, and diagonally athwart every available inch of superficial area elsewhere, aided and abetted by silver and steel-beaded handbags and featherweight umbrellas for purposes of assault, I tell you every blessed damozel of the lot was a walking arsenal of destruction. All one of those women had to do was to whizz around three times like a dervish, poke her head either to the right or to the left, and gain three yards, while I might twist around like a pinwheel, or an electric fan, and get nothing for my pains save a skewered nose, or a poke in the back that suggested the presence[Pg 56] of a member of the Black Hand Society. In addition to all this I fear I have sustained internal injuries of serious import. My teeth are intact, save for two feathers that are so deeply imbedded at the back of my wisdom teeth that I fear I shall have to have them pulled, but every time I breathe one of my ribs behaves as if in some way it had got itself tangled up with my left shoulder blade. Why, the pressure upon me at one time was so great that I began to feel like a rosebud placed inside the family Bible by an old maid whose lover has evaporated, to be pressed and preserved there until his return. This little pancake that is about to fulfill its destiny as a messenger from a cold and heartless outside world to my inner man, is a rotund, bulgent, balloon-shaped bit of puffed-up convex protuberance compared to the way I felt after that whirl of feminity had put[Pg 57] me through the clothes-wringer. I was as flat as a joke of Caesar's after its four thousandth semiannual appearance in London Punch, and in respect to thickness I was pressed so thin that you could have rolled me around your umbrella, and still been able to get the cover on."

[Pg 55]

[Pg 56]

[Pg 57]

"You never were very deep, anyhow," suggested the Bibliomaniac.

"Whence the wonder of it grows," said the Idiot. "Normally I am fathomless compared to the thin, waferlike quality of my improfundity as I flickered to the floor after that dreadful pressure was removed."

"How about women getting crushed?" demanded the Landlady defiantly. "If a poor miserable little wisp of a woman can go through that sort of thing, I don't see why a big, brawny man like you can't."

"Because, as I have already 

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