It may be allowed, however, that vehemence is more often a distinguishing mark of little persons than of big ones. Similarly, little persons are, as a rule, more prone to indulge in a scornful vein, and here there shall be a thing whispered to the small girl. The tall are rarely so contemptuous to the small as the small are to the—smaller. This appears to have been so from of old. Thus it was, according to an old Greek fable, the ant that said of the mite when the beasts—including the elephant and the whale—were summoned before Jupiter, that she—the mite—was so small as to be beneath notice. This objection—coming from the ant—must have surprised the elephant and the whale.
To conclude. Since (as the proverb has it) they are not all big men who reap the harvest, and since, equally, they are not all small men who do this, the thing of main importance would appear to be not a man’s physical height; and, as is the case with men in this matter, so is, it may safely be assumed, the case with the daughters of men.
At what time do you dine? Dinner is the chief physiological event in the day. Therefore the answer to the question “At what time do you dine?” is a very important one, although the true reason for the answer is not often understood.
There are really but two ways of arranging the day’s meals; the one, the more rational, we may call the French way; the other, the less rational, we may call the English labourer’s way. The first arrangement is carried out by nearly every nation except ourselves. It consists in a very light breakfast, a fair meal after noon, and the chief meal in the evening.
The second arrangement consists of a fair breakfast, the chief meal at about one o’clock, and a small meal in the evening.
And then there is our own, the irrational method of feeding—a big breakfast, a scrap for lunch, and the dinner in the evening.
But if this division of meals is not physiologically correct, why do we adhere to it?
The answer to this is that we choose the least harmful of several very wrong methods. The man in the middle class in England does not apportion out for himself any definite time for meals; if he did not dine in the evening, he would never properly digest any meal. Take a busy City man, for instance. He arranges his time in such a manner that he swallows down his last teaspoonful of tea at breakfast about a quarter of a second before he runs to catch his train. If it were not that he has to keep still while in the train, he would never digest his meal at all.