"Thank you, dear," she said. "I call that very nice of you. You don't look so bad yourself," she added, with that touch of surprise which always came into the voices of those who, meeting Gally after a lapse of years, found him so bright and rosy.
This man's fitness was one of the eternal mysteries. Speaking of him, a historian of Blandings Castle had once written: "A thoroughly misspent life had left the Hon. Galahad Threepwood in what appeared to be perfect, even exuberantly perfect physical condition. How a man who ought to have had the liver of the century could look as he did was a constant source of perplexity to his associates. It seemed incredible that anyone who had had such an extraordinarily good time all his life should, in the evening of that life, be so superbly robust."
Striking words, but well justified. Instead of the blot on a proud family which his sister Constance, his sister Julia, his siter Dora and all his other sisters considered him, he might have been a youngish teetotaller who had subsisted from boyhood on yogurt yeast, wheat germ, and blackstrap molasses. He himself attributed his health to steady smoking, plenty of alcohol, and his lifelong belief that it was bad form to go to bed before three in the morning.
(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
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