I merely was attaining to a pleasant, a becoming and a dignified fullness of contour as I neared my thirtieth birthday.

So why worry about what was natural and normal among persons of my temperament, and having my hereditary impulses, upon attaining a given age?
I am convinced that men who are getting fat are generally like that.

For every added pound an added excuse, for each multiplying inch at the waistline a new plea in abatement to be set up in the mind.

I see the truth of it now.

When you start getting fat you start getting fatuous.
With the indubitable proof of his infirmity mounting in superimposed folds of tissues before his very gaze, with the rounded evidence presented right there in front of him where he can rest his elbows on it, your average fattish man nevertheless refuses to acknowledge the visible situation.
Vanity blinds his one eye, love of self-indulgence blinds the other.
Observe now how I speak in the high moral tone of a reformed offender, which is the way of reformed offenders and other reformers the world over.
We are always most virtuous in retrospect, as the fact of the crime recedes.