Purse-o-nality.

Personality or purse-o-nality is rather physical than metaphysical. Life's prizes are consistently arrested and put into gold storage by the human bean with the brain power to recognise opportunity in the raw, and the horse-power to shape it to his own spends and push it home in his own barrow.

It is possible, of course, to maintain life without brains, but only because it requires presence of mind to recognise the absence of it, and without it the body having no means of recognising the fact that it is practically defunct, goes on growing regardless.

All of which brings us to the subject of Health and Happiness. Happiness is Health's sparking partner, and wealth is incidental or accidental. If you are fourteen stone in your socks, consume fried liver for breakfast, and greet the morn with the joyousness of a Manchew-rian tiger who has dropped on a member of the Gastronomical Society, then you are Nature's answer to the maiden's prayer, the man they couldn't wang, the elephant's page 14

“Nature's answer to the Maiden's Prayer.”

elbow, and love's young dream come true.

Health is regained not by railing but by rail.

When life is sort of gluey
And the corpuscles are pale,
One can build his failing tissues
By a journey on the rail,
Which provides such prospects pleasing
And such inspiration fresh,
That the mind is separated
From the evils of the flesh.

The pursuit of health is the passion of the plutocrat, and is remindful of that old song “Bring Back My Body to Me.” Too late the merchant quince who has neglected liver for lucre, realises that the boyish figure is no girlish dream, but is something to “have and to hold.” Consequently he spends large figures on his large figure, mindful of those wistful words, “Too late, too late, you cannot canter now.”

If an imperfect stranger were to smack him on the back in a spirit of give and skate, or even wang him abaft the fountain pen, he would probably claim damages for contempt of courtesy or false pretensions; yet he divorces himself from his currency to induce unknown man-handlers to knead him with their bare hands, manipulate his skin like chewing gum, and run over his personal defects with rolling pins. He submits to the indignity of belabour and uncomplainingly figures his cheque to check his figure. Before he fell for the machinations of Mammon, health was his inheritance; but he disinherited health after inheriting wealth. Not that every plutocrat is a suit o’ fat; on the contrary, poorliness is as common as portliness, and just as uncomely. In fact absence of avoirdupois is more mortifying than presence of rhind. The weighty personality is not necessarily a banned rotunder, but often the undermanned is undermined by the consciousness that, on account of his superfluity of flats and sharps, he is more amusical than musical.