The Unimportance of being Skinny.

Skinny has turned up again. He is one of those people who are either turning up or being turned down. Skinny provides little psychological solace through the naked eye, and he seems to exist in defiance of all evidence to the contrary; but his heart beats Romance like a tom-tom in a sound-proof cell. Skinny is happy to be Skinny in spite of the unimportance of being Skinny. Often the mediocre are made great by whisky, the timid made courageous by fear, the weak made strong by necessity, and the vacillating made firm by desperation; but Skinny recognises that he was merely made Skinny.

As a baby his nurse considered him a blemish on the fair face of the child-welfare movement, his mother nurtured him with misgivings, and his father blamed him on to his mother's people. At school, the part of him which answered the roll was subsersive of the part which sponsored the whole. While the principle imports, exports and disports of Anglomania were being subjected to cross-examination, Skinny's inward and invisible sighs were for the far white north, the far whiter south, the homicidal west, or east of east where the breakers pound the coral reef.

Since he left school, with nothing to his credit except what he had failed to learn, he has been searching for the elusive elements of which rainbow's feet are made.

Outwardly, Skinny is one of those people whom you would sue without evidence, arrest without attention, ignore without effort, and pass in passing. And yet his pursuit of Lady Lightfoot, the daughter of Illusion, has served to keep his head in the skies and his feet on the ground. Skinny could extract music from the scales of a fish, and beauty from a bag of “bull's eyes.” He has been all things to all men, but only one to himself. One of the many walks of life he has invaded was a run—a non-stop run in the Shepherd's Plate at the Roa Races (unregistered). Skinny was the jockey who rode Gentle Annie to victory, and then some.