by Elsie Lincoln Benedict
Available in 98 free installments
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¶ Even the clothes worn by this type tell the same story. Styles may come and styles may go, but the Osseous goes on forever wearing the same lines and the same general fashions he wore ten years before. If you will recall the men who continued wearing loose, roomy suits long after the "skin-tight" fashions came in, or the women who kept to long, full skirts when short ones were the vogue you will note that every one of them had large joints or long faces.
Bony people find a kind of collar or hat that just suits, and to that hat and that collar they will stick for twenty years!
¶ In every city, neighborhood and country crossroads there is always somebody who defies the styles of today by wearing the styles of ten years ago.
Every such person is a bony individual?never under any circumstances a moon-faced, round-bodied one. In every case you will find that his face is longer, his nose is longer, or his jaw and hands are longer than the average?all Osseous indications.
¶ The bony man's adherence to one style or to one garment is not primarily because he wishes to save money, though saving money is an item that he never overlooks. It is due rather to his inability to change anything about himself in accordance with outside influence until a long time has elapsed.
¶ The Osseous is, as stated at the head of this chapter, a "stayer" and this applies to everything he wears, thinks, says, believes, and to the way he carries on every activity of his life.
No matter how rich he may be he will not buy one kind of car today and another tomorrow, nor one house this week and another in six weeks.
He uses his money, as all of us do, to maintain his type-habits and to give freer rein to them, not to change them to any extent. This type likes sameness. He likes to "get acquainted" with a thing. He never takes up fads and is the most conservative of all types. Unlike the Thoracic, he avoids extremes in everything and dislikes anything savoring of the "showy" or conspicuous.
¶ Because he dislikes display, refuses to yield to the new fangled fashions of polite society and finds it hard to adapt himself to people, the man of this type is seldom a social success.
He is the least of a "ladies' man" of all the types. The Osseous woman is even less disposed to social life than the Osseous man because the business and professional demands, which compel men of this type to mingle with their fellows, are less urgent with her.
¶ The same "yesterday, today and forever" is the kind of food preferred by this type. He seldom orders anything new. The tried and true things he has eaten for twenty-five years are his favorites and it is almost impossible to win him away from them. "I have had bread and milk for supper every Sunday night for thirty years," a bony man said to us not long ago.
¶ The Osseous does not flatter and seldom praises. Even when he would like to, the words do not come easily. But when he does give you a compliment you may know he means it. He is incisive and specific?a little too much so to grace modern social intercourse where so much is froth.
¶ A man of few words is always and invariably a man whose bones are large for his body. The fat man uses up a great many pleasant, suave, merry, harmless words; the Thoracic inundates you with conversation; the Muscular argues, declares and states; but the Osseous alone is sparing of his words.
¶ Bony people are never lavish with anything. They do not waste anything nor throw anything away. These are the people who save things and store them away for years against the day when they may find some use for them. When they do part with them it is always to pass them on "where they will do some one some good."
¶ You never saw a stingy fat man in your life. Imagine a two-hundred-pound miser! Neither have you ever seen a really stingy man who was red-faced and high-chested. Nor have you ever found a real Muscular who was a "tightwad."
But you have known some people who were pretty close with their money. And every one of them was inclined to boniness.
