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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ptomaine Street, by Carolyn Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ptomaine Street
+
+Author: Carolyn Wells
+
+
+Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8386]
+This file was first posted on July 5, 2003
+Last Updated: March 16, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PTOMAINE STREET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, David Widger and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PTOMAINE STREET
+
+THE TALE OF WARBLE PETTICOAT
+
+
+By Carolyn Wells
+
+
+To Roberta Wolf Buehler My Beloved Friend
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD TO A FOOLISH BOOK
+
+  A certain Poet once opined
+  That life is earnest, life is real;
+  But some are of a different mind,
+  And turn to hear the Cap-bells peal.
+  Oft in this Vale of Smiles I've found
+  Foolishness makes the world go round.
+
+  Ecclesiastes, Solomon,
+  And lots of those who've passed before us,
+  Denounced all foolishness and fun,
+  Not so the gay and blithesome Horace;
+  And Shakespeare's Jaques, somewhat hotly,
+  Declared the only wear is Motley!
+
+  We mortals, fools are said to be;
+  And doesn't this seem rather nice?
+  I learn, on good authority,
+  That Fools inhabit Paradise!
+  Honored by kings they've always been;
+  And--you know where Fools may rush in.
+
+  And so, with confidence unshaken,
+  In Cap and Bells, I strike the trail.
+  I know just how, because I've taken
+  A Correspondence Course by mail.
+  I find the Foolish life's less trouble
+  Than Higher, Strenuous or Double.
+  Dear Reader, small the boon I ask,--
+  Your gentle smile, to egg my wit on;
+  Lest people deem my earnest task
+  Not worth the paper it is writ on.
+  Well, at white paper's present worth,
+  That _would_ be rather high-priced mirth!
+
+  I hope you think my lines are bright,
+  I hope you trow my jests are clever;
+  If you approve of what I write
+  Then you and I are friends forever.
+  But if you say my stuff is rotten,
+  You are forgiven and forgotten.
+
+  Though, as the old hymn runs, I may not
+  Sing like the angels, speak like Paul;
+  Though on a golden lyre I play not,
+  As David played before King Saul;
+  Yet I consider this production
+  A gem of verbalesque construction.
+
+  So, what your calling, or your bent,
+  If clergy or if laity,
+  Fall into line. I'll be content
+  And plume me on my gayety,
+  If of the human file and rank
+  I can make nine-tenths smile,--and thank.
+
+
+
+
+PTOMAINE STREET
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+On a Pittsburgh block, where three generations ago might have been heard
+Indian war-whoops--yes, and the next generation wore hoops, too--a
+girl child stood, in evident relief, far below the murky gray of the
+Pittsburgh sky.
+
+She couldn't see an Indian, not even a cigar store one, and she wouldn't
+have noticed him anyway, for she was shaking with laughter.
+
+A breeze, which had hurried across from New York for the purpose, blew
+her hat off, but she recked not, and only tautened her hair ribbon with
+an involuntary jerk just in time to prevent that going too.
+
+A girl on a Pittsburgh block; bibulous, plastic, young; drinking the air
+in great gulps, as she would later drink life.
+
+It is Warble Mildew, expelled from Public School, and carolling with
+laughter.
+
+She had only attended for four weeks and they had been altogether
+wasted. In her class there were several better girls, many brighter, one
+prettier, but none fatter. The schoolgirls marveled at the fatness of
+her legs when, skirts well tucked up, they all waded in the brook. Every
+cell of her body was plump and she had dimples in her wrists.
+
+And cheeks, like:
+
+  A satin pincushion pink,
+  Before rude pins have touched it.
+
+Her eyes were of the lagoon blue found in picture postcards of Venice
+and her hair was a curly yellow brush-heap. Sunning over with curls--you
+know, sort of ringolets.
+
+In fact, Warble was not unlike one of those Kewpie things, only she was
+more dressed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Expelled!
+
+That's the way things were to come to Warble all her life. Fate laid on
+in broad strokes--in great splashes--in slathers.
+
+Expelled! And she had scarce dared hope for such a thing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To sound the humor of Warble.
+
+She hated school. Books, restraint, routine, scratching slate pencils,
+gum under desks, smells--all the set up palette of the schoolroom was
+not to her a happy vehicle of self-expression.
+
+Often, in hope of being sent home, she had let a rosy tongue-tip
+protrude from screwed up red lips at teacher, but it had gone
+unpunished.
+
+And now--
+
+Now, rocking in triumphant, glorious mirth, her plump shoulders hunched
+in very ecstasy, the child was on the peak!
+
+Expelled! Oh, gee!
+
+And all because she had put a caterpillar down Pearl Jane Tuttle's back.
+One little, measly caterpillar.
+
+Pearl Jane had sat right in front of her.
+
+A loose neckband round a scrawny neck.
+
+And when Pearl Jane wiggled, a space of neck between two thin, tight
+black pigtails--a consequent safe-deposit that was fairly crying out to
+have something dropped down it.
+
+A caterpillar mooching along the schoolroom aisle--clearly sent by
+Providence.
+
+Helpless in the grip of an irresistible subconscious complex, Warble
+scoops up the caterpillar and in an instant has fed him into the gaping
+maw at the back of that loose gingham neckband.
+
+Gr-r-r-r-rh!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That, then, is why Warble stood in such evident relief on the Pittsburgh
+block.
+
+Expelled! The world was hers!
+
+It had always been hers, to be sure, but it was now getting bigger and
+more hers every minute.
+
+The very first day she went to school, a little boy said to her:
+
+“Do you like me?”
+
+“No,” said Warble.
+
+The little boy gave her all his candy and his red balloon.
+
+So you see, she had a way--and got away with it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Warble was an orphan. She had a paprika-seasoned sister, married to a
+chiropodist, in Oshkosh. But for all that, she planned to earn her own
+living.
+
+And she had an ambition. At present beyond her grasp, yet so sure
+was she of its ultimate attainment, that she shaped her entire cosmic
+consciousness toward that end. Her ambition was not unique, perhaps
+not unattainable. It had been achieved by others with seemingly little
+effort and less skill; and though as yet, merely a radiant hope, Warble
+was determined that some day she would gain her goal.
+
+Her ambition was to get married. Her sister had; her mother had; she
+politely assumed her grandmother had.
+
+She would.
+
+Often she imagined herself the heroine of delightful scenes she watched
+at the cinema. She loved the slow unwinding of the story on the screen,
+but when engaged with her imagination she hurried it on in haste to
+reach the final close-up.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was at no one's advice, but because of her own inner yearnings that
+Warble took a job as waitress in a Bairns' Restaurant.
+
+She reveled in the white tiles, the white gloss paint, the eternal
+clearing-up and the clatter of flatware. She loved the flatware--it
+always made her think of a wedding--sometimes of her own.
+
+She adored the white-capped King Alfred baking his cakes in the window,
+but merely as a fixture, as she adored the mute stacks of clean plates
+and the piles of pathetic little serviettes.
+
+In a more intimate and personal way she adored the pork and beans, the
+ham and eggs, the corned beef and cabbage, and--importantly--the gentle,
+easy-going puddings and cup custards. These things delighted her soul
+and dimpled her body.
+
+She was proud of her fellow-waitresses, proud of their aspirations (the
+same as her own).
+
+Having exceptional opportunity, Warble learned much of culinary art
+and architecture, at least she became grounded in elementary alimentary
+science.
+
+She had little notebooks filled with rules for Parisian pastry, Hindu
+recipes for curry; foreign dishes with modern American improvements.
+
+Joyously she learned to make custard pie. This, as the tumultous future
+proved, was indicative.
+
+Only the little smiling gods of circumstance, wickedly winking at one
+another, knew that when Warble whipped cream and beat eggs, she laid
+the corner stone of a waiting Destiny, known as yet but to the blinking
+stars above the murky Pittsburgh sky.
+
+She was extravagant as to shoes and diet; and, on the whole, she felt
+that she was living.
+
+She was not mistaken.
+
+She went to dances, but though sometimes she toddled a bit, mostly she
+sat out or tucked in.
+
+During her three years as a waitress several customers looked at her
+with interest though without much principle.
+
+The president of a well-known bank, the proprietor of a folding-bed
+concern, a retired plumber, a Divinity student and a ticket-chopper.
+
+None of these made her bat an eyelash.
+
+For months no male came up for air. Then, the restaurant door swung back
+on its noiseless check and spring, and in walked Big Bill Petticoat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+The Petticoats were one of the oldest and pride-fullest of New England
+families. So that settles the status of the Petticoats. A couple of them
+came over in the _Mayflower_, with the highboys and cradles and things,
+and they founded the branch of Connecticut Petticoats--than which, of
+course, there is nothing more so.
+
+Of course, the Petticoats were not in the very upper circles of society,
+not in the Dress Circle, so to speak, but they formed a very necessary
+foundation, they stood for propriety and decency, and the Petticoats
+were stiff enough to stand alone.
+
+Another fine old New England family, the Cottons.
+
+Intermarriage linked the two, and the Cotton-Petticoats crowded all
+other ancient and honorable names off the map of Connecticut and nodded
+condescendingly to the Saltonwells and Hallistalls. Abbotts and Cabots
+tried to patronize them, but the plain unruffled Cotton-Petticoats held
+their peace and their position.
+
+The present scion, Dr. Petticoat, was called Big Bill, not because of
+his name or stature, but because of the size of his bills. He presented
+them quarterly, and though his medicine was optional--the patient could
+take it or leave it--the bills had to be paid.
+
+Wherefore Dr. Petticoat was at the head of his profession financially.
+Also by reputation and achievement, for he had the big idea.
+
+He was a specialist, and, better yet, a specialist in Ptomaine
+Poisoning.
+
+Rigidly did he adhere to his chosen line, never swerving to right or
+left. People might die on one side of him from water on the brain and on
+the other side from water on the palate, not a prescription could they
+get out of Big Bill Petticoat unless they could put up unmistakable
+symptoms of ptomaine poisoning.
+
+And he was famous. People brought their ptomaines to him from the
+far places, his patients included the idlest rich, the bloatedest
+aristocrats, the most profitable of the profiteers. His Big Bill system
+worked well, and he was rich beyond the most Freudian dreams of avarice.
+
+As to appearance, Petticoat was very pretty, with that fresh rosy
+beauty that is so attractive. His walnut hair was fine and silky, but
+a permanent wave made it fuzz forth in a bushy crinkle that was
+distractingly lovely. His tweezed eyebrows were arched to a perfect span
+and his finger nails showed a piano polish.
+
+His features were cold-chiseled and his coloring was exquisite. In fact,
+his coloring was too good to be true, and no wonder, for it came out of
+a very modern and up-to-date six-cylinder makeup box.
+
+His lips looked as if they were used to giving orders in restaurants,
+and he wore clothes which you could never quite forget.
+
+Warble edged toward the stranger, and murmured nothing in particular,
+but somehow he drifted into the last and only vacant seat at her table.
+
+She whisked him a 2 x 2 napkin, dumped a clatter of flatware at him, and
+stood, awaiting his order.
+
+The pause becoming lengthy, she murmured with her engaging smile,
+“Whatcha want to eat?”
+
+“Pleased to eat you,” he responded, looking at her as though she was an
+agreeable discovery.
+
+Small wonder, for Warble was so peachy and creamy, so sweet and
+delectable that she was a far more appetizing sight than most viands
+are. She smiled again--engagingly this time, too.
+
+Thus in the Painted Vale of Huneker, Vamp and Victim beguiled the hours.
+Thus, and not in treacled cadences, intrigued Mariar and Sir Thomas in
+the back alley.
+
+“Do you like it here?” asked the doctor.
+
+“Yop. But sometimes I feel wasted--”
+
+“You don't look wasted--”
+
+“No--” after a hasty glance in the wall mirror.
+
+“Don't you get sick of the sight of food?”
+
+“Here, oh, no! I don't know any lovelier sight than our kitchens--yes,
+yes, sir, I'll get your pied frotatoes at oneth.”
+
+When Warble was a bit frustrated or embarrassed, she often inverted her
+initials and lisped. It was one of her ways.
+
+The other clients at her table had no intention of being neglected while
+their Pickfordian waitress smiled engagingly on a newcomer.
+
+It was the iceman who had hollered. He seemed to be merely a red-faced
+inanimate object, that worked by strange and compound levers.
+
+Next him was a hat-check girl, a queenly person who communed with
+something set in the lid of her vanity case, and fed on chicken à la
+king.
+
+Then there was a newsboy, whose all-observant eyes darted about
+everywhere, the while he absorbed baked beans and ketchup.
+
+An old maid shopper. She merely brooded over her worn and pencil-scored
+memorandum, and muttered of fringe and buttons as she spilled tea on her
+samples of Navy blue foulard.
+
+A blind man. Of no interest save that he had a calm and gentle demeanor
+and was the only one who didn't spill things. His face wore a grieved
+but resigned look, as if something had died in his scrambled eggs. The
+iceman, who had the hard, set jaw of a prize fighter was successfully
+eating steak, and he welcomed the incoming fried potatoes, as one greets
+a new instalment of a serial.
+
+It was a fat and pink and lovely Warble who at last trotted back with
+Petticoat's order.
+
+The great specialist had an unbridled passion for pie, and throwing
+restraint to the winds he had ordered three kinds. The wedges
+Warble brought were the very widest she could wheedle from the head
+pie-cutter--and Warble was some wheedler, especially when she coaxed
+prettily for a big pieth of cuthtard.
+
+Petticoat looked at her again as she came, pie-laden.
+
+Her cap was a bit askew, but her eyes weren't. In her white linen dress
+and apron and white cap, her little pink face looked to Petticoat's
+appraising glance like a postage stamp on an expanse of white linen
+envelope.
+
+Little did he think, as he took his custard pie that he was about to put
+his foot in it. Yet he did.
+
+“May I see you again sometime?” he said, ignoring the hat-check girl's
+ogling and the iceman's cold stare.
+
+Warble made a face at him. It was one of her ways.
+
+“What's your address?” he asked. “You can ask the Boss--if you really
+want to know.”
+
+“Want to know! Say, you waitress!”
+
+Of the love-making of Warble and Big Bill Petticoat there is nothing to
+be reported which may not be read in any Satevepost serial, which may
+not be heard at any summer resort, in any winter garden. They were
+zoology and history. Their speech was free silver and their silence was
+golden.
+
+It was a non-stop courtship. All the plump beauty of youth and all the
+assured complacence of a well-to-do married man kept them up in the air.
+
+Petticoat wasn't a married man, but he had their technique.
+
+They took a walk, and followed a roundabout way. Then they sat on a
+bank, and his arm followed a roundabout way.
+
+She seemed more young and tender than ever, in a simple white muslin
+frock and blue sash. Her broad-leafed hat was decked with a few pink
+roses, and roll-top white socks added a good deal to the picture.
+
+Petticoat was charmed.
+
+“Golly, but I love you, Warble!” he cried.
+
+She did not answer, but she touched the upper edge of the wallet in his
+breast pocket with an exploring gesture.
+
+“You think I'm too darn aesthetic! Well, you're not, and so we ought to
+mate. We're complementary to one another, like air and sunshine or light
+and shade.”
+
+“Or pork and beans, or pie and cheese.”
+
+“Yes, or like stout and porter--I'll be the porter, oh--what's the use
+of talking? Let my lips talk to you!”
+
+He kissed her cheek, imprinting thereon a Cupid's bow, by reason of his
+own addiction to the lipstick.
+
+Warble rubbed it off with the back of her hand, and said, “Oh,
+pleathe--pleathe.”
+
+She wondered if she ought to have said thank you, but it was only a
+drifting thought and she turned the other cheek. Then she smiled her
+engaging smile and they were engaged.
+
+Later in the game, she said, with pretty diffidence, “I would like to
+thee Butterfly Thenter.” And she blushed like the inside of those pink
+meat melons.
+
+“I knew it!” and Petticoat produced a pile of Sunday Picture
+Supplements.
+
+Her cheek nested in his permanent wave, Warble studied the pictures.
+
+They were the last word in artistic architecture. Truly, Butterfly
+Center, where Petticoat lived, was a veritable Utopia, Arcadia, Spotless
+Town and Happy Valley all rolled into one. Broad streets, arching
+trees, sublimated houses, glorified shops--it seemed to Warble like a
+flitter-work Christmas card from the drug-store.
+
+“How'd you like to scoot up there with me in a fast aeroplane?” he
+jollied her.
+
+“It might be--a lark--” she dubioused.
+
+“But here's the picture!” and proudly he exhibited a full length view of
+his own home.
+
+“Ptomaine Haul,” he exploited, proudly. “Built every inch of it from the
+busy little ptomaines. Coral insects nothing on that, eh? And here's
+the sort of people I practice on. Old Leathersham, now--he has a corking
+château--French Renaissance. And Mrs. Charity Givens--she has a Georgian
+shack. And, oh, yes, here's Iva Payne. She's one of my most profitable
+patients--sick all the time.”
+
+Warble studied the pictures.
+
+“What expensive people,” she said, “dear--so dear.”
+
+“Yes, great people. You'd love 'em. They're just layin' for you. Come
+on, Warble, will you?”
+
+“Yop,” she murmured, from his coat pocket, “Sweet, so sweet.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Among the rolling stock of a great railroad, a moving mass of steel.
+A soft sludge as it came noiselessly to rest beneath the glazed chintz
+awnings of the Butterfly Center station.
+
+A faint scent of chypre from Petticoat's cigarette as he alit.
+
+From his private train, which had slithered across the intervening
+spaces and slid into its moorings as butter slides from a hot plate.
+
+It is September, cool, green and well-sprinkled.
+
+The obviously important man was followed by a yellow-topped,
+rose-cheeked girl, whose eyes were all blue and a yard wide as she
+looked about.
+
+About what?
+
+About eighteen.
+
+They were Dr. Big Bill Petticoat and his bride, Warble.
+
+They had been married and had spent their honeymoon in riotous loving.
+
+It had been transforming. Warble had been frightened to discover how
+hungry she could be even on a wedding trip.
+
+Bill had mused to himself; what's the difference between an optimist and
+a pessimist? One honeymoon. And now they had reached their home town.
+People were not altogether new to Warble. She had seen them before. But
+these were her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn--and, they
+didn't seem to need it.
+
+They distressed her. They were so smart. She had always held that there
+is no style in America, no chic effects out of Paris.
+
+But here on the terrace of the simple little hewn stone station
+were hordes of men and women who seemed to be, mentally, morally and
+physically, literally butterflies.
+
+“Isn't there any way of waking them up?” she begged of Petticoat,
+grabbing his arm and shaking him.
+
+“These guys? Wake 'em up? What for? They're happy.”
+
+“But they're so smug--no, that isn't what I mean. They're so
+stick-in-the-mud.”
+
+“Look here, Warble, you want to get over your fool idea that because a
+woman is slender she isn't adorable. These folks are up to date, snuff
+and mischief.”
+
+“I know, that's what's biting me. Life seems so hard for them.”
+
+“Oh, they don't mind it. Now you must meet the bunch. They're all down
+here to meet their husbands or something just as good. Now you behave
+yourself.”
+
+“Yop.”
+
+She had a grip on herself. She was ready to kiss and be friends with
+them all. But she was scared at the rackety pack who ballyhooed like
+Coney Island and surged down upon her like a Niagara Falls.
+
+She had the impression that all the men had soft voices, large,
+embracing arms, gimlet eyes and bored, impersonal smiles. She knew they
+were taking her in. Their pleasant hoots and yells of greeting overcame
+her.
+
+“Oh, pleathe--pleathe,” she lisped.
+
+In her fresh frilled dimity and soft sash of baby-blue Surah, her rolled
+white socks disclosing but a few tantalizing inches of seashell-pink
+calf, Warble stood, eyes cast down, a pretty, foolish thing,
+
+  As soft as young,
+  As gay as soft,
+
+and, to a man, the male population of Butterfly Center fell for her.
+
+Not so the remainder of the citizens.
+
+One of the men was yelling at Petticoat:
+
+“Hop into my car, Bill, Don't see yours--I'll tote the bride-person
+you've got there--with joy and gladness.” Warble looked at the yeller.
+
+“Can't quite place me, chick, can you?” he grinned at her. “Well I'm
+only old Goldwin Leathersham--no use for me in the world but to spend
+money. Want me to spend some on you? Here's my old thing--step up here,
+Marigold, and be introduced. She's really nicer than she looks, Mrs.
+Petticoat.”
+
+“Indeed I'm not,” Marigold Leathersham cried gaily, “I couldn't
+be--nobody could be!”
+
+She came running--a beautiful, slim young woman, with a wealth of
+expensive looking gold hair, white and gold teeth that broke into a
+lavish smile. Her voice was rich and though she looked above, away from
+and through Warble, yet she saw her.
+
+“So glad to welcome you, you pretty baby,” she chirruped. “You're going
+to love us all, aren't you?”
+
+“Yop,” said Warble, and smiled her engaging smile.
+
+“You bet she'll love us,” declared Leathersham, “she'll make the
+world go round! Hello, Little One,” he turned to pat the cheek of a
+white-haired, red-faced old lady, who hawk-eyed and hawk-nosed, stood
+by, listening in. “This, Mrs. Petticoat, is our Lady Bountiful, Mrs.
+Charity Givens--noted for her generosity. She ostentatiously heads
+all Donation Lists, and she's going to start a rest cure where your
+husband's unsuccessful cases may die in peace. And here's one of the
+cases. Hello, Iva Payne!”
+
+“Hello,” languidly responded a girl like a long pale lily--a Burne-Jones
+type, who sometimes carried around a small stained-glass window to rest
+her head against.
+
+“Are you really Bill's wife?” she asked, a little disinterestedly, of
+Warble.
+
+“Yop,” said Warble, and made a face at her.
+
+“How quaint,” said Iva.
+
+“Whoopee, Baby! Here we are,” and Petticoat rescued his bride from the
+middle of a crowd and yanked her toward his car.
+
+The car was a museum piece, and as Warble caromed into its cushions she
+felt that her lines had fallen in pleasant places.
+
+That was the way Fate came to Warble. In big fat chunks, in slathers.
+Unexpected, sudden, inescapable--that's Fate all over.
+
+“I shall like Mr. Leathersham--I shall call him Goldie. They're all
+nice and friendly--the men. But this town! Oh, my Heavens! This Jewel
+Casket--this Treasure Table! I can't live through it! This Floating
+Island of a Tipsy Charlotte!” Her husband nudged her. “You look like you
+had a pain,” he said; “Scared? I don't expect you to fit in at first.
+You have to get eased into things. It's different from Pittsburgh. But
+you'll come to like it--love is so free here, and the smartest people on
+earth.”
+
+She winked at him. “I love you for your misunderstanding. I'm just
+dog-tired. And too many chocolates. Give me a rest, dear. I'm all in
+from wear sheeriness.”
+
+She laid her feet in his lap and snuggled into the corner of the
+pearl-colored upholstery.
+
+She was ready for her new home, beautiful, celebrated Ptomaine Haul.
+Petticoat told her that his mother had been living with him, but had
+fled incontinently on hearing a description of Warble.
+
+The bride chuckled and smiled engagingly as the car slithered round a
+corner and stopped under the _porte cochère_ of a great house set in the
+midst of a landscape.
+
+Neo-Colonial, of a purity unsurpassed by the Colonists themselves.
+
+A park stretching in front; gardens at the back; steps up to a great
+porch, and a front door copied from the Frary house in Old Deerfield.
+
+A great hall--at its back twin halves of a perfect staircase. To the
+right, a charming morning room, where Petticoat led his bride.
+
+“You like it? It's not inharmonious. I left it as it is--in case you
+care to rebuild or redecorate.”
+
+“It's a sweet home--” she was touched by his indifference. “So
+artistic.”
+
+Petticoat winced, but he was a polite chap, and he only said,
+carelessly, “Yes, home is where the art is,” and let it go at that.
+
+In the hall and the great library she was conscious of vastness and
+magnificent distances, but, she thought, if necessary, I can use roller
+skates.
+
+As she followed Petticoat and the current shift of servants upstairs,
+she quavered to herself like the fat little gods of the hearth.
+
+She took her husband into her arms, and felt that at last she had
+realized her one time dreams of the moving pictures, ay, even to the
+final close-up.
+
+What mattered, so long as she could paw at the satin back of his shirt,
+and admire his rich and expensive clothing.
+
+“Dear--so dear--” she murmured.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+“The Leathershams are giving a ball for us to-night,” Petticoat said,
+casually, as he powdered his nose in the recesses of his triplicate
+mirror.
+
+“A ball?”
+
+“Oh, I don't mean a dance--I mean--er--well, what you'd call a sociable,
+I suppose.”
+
+“Oh, ain't we got fun!”
+
+“And, I say, Warble, I've got to chase a patient now; can you hike about
+a bit by yourself?”
+
+“Course I can. Who's your patient?”
+
+“Avery Goodman--the rector of St. Judas' church. He will eat terrapin
+made out of--you know what. And so, he's all tied up in knots with
+ptomaine poisoning and I've got to straighten him out. It means a lot to
+us, you know.”
+
+“I know; skittle.”
+
+Left alone, Warble proceeded systematically to examine the interior of
+Ptomaine Haul. She gazed about her own bedroom and a small part of
+its exquisite beauty dawned upon her. It was an exact copy of Marie
+Antoinette's and the delicately carved furniture and pale blue
+upholstery and hangings harmonized with the painted domed ceiling and
+paneled walls.
+
+The dressing table bore beautiful appointments of ivory, as solid as
+Warble's own dome and from the Cupid-held canopy over the bed to the
+embroidered satin foot-cushions, it was top hole.
+
+The scent was of French powders, perfumes and essences and sachets, such
+as Warble had not smelled since before the war.
+
+“Can you beat it,” she groaned. “How can I live with doodads like this?”
+ She saw the furniture as a circle of hungry restaurant customers ready
+to eat her up. She kicked the dozen lace pillows off the head of the
+bed.
+
+“No utility anywhere,” she cried. “Everything futile, inutile, brutal! I
+hate it! I hate it! Why did I ever--”
+
+And then she remembered she was a Petticoat now, a lace, frilled
+Petticoat--not one of those that Oliver Herford so pathetically dubbed
+“the short and simple flannels of the poor.”
+
+Yes, she was now a Petticoat--one of the aristocratic Cotton-Petticoats,
+washable, to be sure, but a dressy Frenchy Petticoat, and as such she
+must take her place on the family clothesline.
+
+She drifted from oriel window to casement, and on to a great becurtained
+and becushioned bay, and looked out on the outlook.
+
+She saw gardens like the Tuileries and Tuilerums, soft, shining pools,
+little skittering fountains, marble Cupids and gay-tinted flowers. This
+was the scene for her to look down upon and live up to.
+
+“I mustn't! I mustn't! I'm nervous this afternoon! Am I sick?...
+Good Lord, I hope it isn't that! Not now! I'd hate it--I'd be scared
+to death! Some day--but, please, kind Fate, not now! I don't want to go
+down now with ptomaine poisoning! Not till after I've had my dinner! I'm
+going out for a walk.”
+
+When Warble had plodded along for six hours, she had pretty well done up
+the town.
+
+Ptomaine Street, which took its name from her husband's own residence,
+was a wide, leafy avenue with a double row of fine old trees on each
+side. They were Lebbek trees, and the whole arrangement was patterned
+after the avenue which Josephine built for Napoleon, out to the Mena
+House.
+
+She passed the homes of the most respectable citizens. Often they were
+set back from the road, and the box hedges or tall iron fences prevented
+her from seeing the houses. But she saw enough and sped on to the more
+interesting business and shopping section of Butterfly Center.
+
+She passed Ariel Inn, the hotel being like a Swiss Chalet, perched on
+some convenient rocks that rose to a height above street level. A few
+fairly nimble chamois were leaping over these rocks and Warble heard a
+fairy-like chime of bells as afternoon tea was announced.
+
+A man in an artist's smock sauntered across the street. A palette on
+one thumb, he scratched his chin with the other. A hearse, its long
+box filled with somebody, crawled down the block. A dainty Sedan with a
+woman's idle face at its window wafted by. From a Greek Temple came the
+sound of Interpretative Dancing, and the applause of perfunctory hands.
+
+She wanted to elope. Her own ideas of utility, efficiency, and economy
+were being shattered--broken in pieces like a potter's vessel. Her sense
+of proportion, her instinct for relative values, her abhorrence of waste
+motion, her inborn system and method, all were swept away as a thief in
+the night. Could she reform this giddy whirl? Could she bring chaos out
+of cosmos? Was her own ego sufficient to egg her on in her chosen work?
+
+She haed her doots.
+
+She maundered down the street on one side--back on the other.
+
+Dudie's Drug-store was like unto a Turkish Mosque. Minaret and pinnaret,
+battlement and shuttle-door, it was a perfect drug-store, nobly planned.
+The long flight of steps leading up to its ptortal was a masterpiece in
+the step line.
+
+Inside, the Soda Pagoda was a joy of temple bells and soft, sweet
+drinks, while at the prescription counter, the line formed on the right,
+to get Dr. Petticoat's prescriptions filled for their ptomaines.
+
+A Moldavian Incense Shop was the barber's; a half-timbered house
+sold English-built clothes; a brick affair of Georgian influences and
+splendid lines, housed the hardware needed by the Butterflies, and the
+milliner's was a replica of the pyramid of Cestus.
+
+The bank was the Vatican, with Swiss guards in the doorway.
+
+Perpetual waste motion! In all the town not one building that connoted
+to Warble the apotheosis of efficiency shown by the King Alfred tossing
+cakes in the window of Bairns' Restaurant. Not a dozen buildings that
+even suggested use in addition to their beauty.
+
+And the street was cluttered with trees in tubs, window boxes,
+sudden little fountains or statues; gilded wicker birdcages on tall
+poles--songs issuing therefrom.
+
+Arbors, covered with pink Dorothy Perkinses, here and there by the
+curbside. And, worst of all, people sitting idle in the arbors. Idle!
+
+She wouldn't have cared so much, if the people had been busy--even one
+of them. She fought herself. “I must be wrong. It can't be as silly as
+it looks! It can't!”
+
+She went home and found Petticoat waiting for her.
+
+“Like the burg, eh? Great stuff, what? Not an eyesore inside the city
+wall. Good work, I'll megaphone.”
+
+Warble sat down in an easy-going chair--so easy, it slid across the room
+with her, and collided with a life-sized Chinese lady of yellow stone.
+
+“Yes,” Warble responded, “it's very uninteresting.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Goldwin Leathersham was a great Captain of Industry. In fact, he put the
+dust in industry, or, at least, he took it out of it. He got it, anyway.
+
+His home was an Aladdin's Palace, with a slight influence of Solomon's
+Temple. Gold was his keynote, and he was never off the key.
+
+When our Petticoats arrived at the party, they were met by gold-laced
+footmen, who whisked them into shape and passed them along.
+
+Warble found herself in a white and gold salon, so vast, that she felt
+like a goldfish out of water. The place looked as if Joseph Urban had
+designed it after he had died and gone to Golconda. Whatever wasn't
+white was gold, and the other way round. The gold piano had only white
+keys, and the draperies were cloth of gold with bullion fringe. All
+real, too--no rolled or plated stuff.
+
+A huge coat-of-arms in a gold frame announced that Mr. Leathersham was
+descended from the Gold Digger Indians, a noble ancestry indeed; and it
+was no secret that his wife had played in “The Gold-diggers,” during its
+second decade run.
+
+Marigold Leathersham was a charming hostess, and greeted Warble with a
+shriek of welcome. “You duck,” she cried; “how heavenly of you to dress
+so well.”
+
+Warble was simply attired in a white pussy-willow silk underslip. In her
+haste and excitement she had forgotten to add the gown meant to go over
+it, and as she wore no jewels save the chased gold lingerie clasps
+at her shoulders, the result was a simplicity as charming as it was
+unintentional.
+
+And so she made a hit.
+
+That was the way things came to Warble; a hit--a social success--and all
+because she forgot to put on her frock.
+
+She mingled with the glittering throng of gilded youth, of golden lads
+and girls, of gilt-edged married people, and found herself in the arms
+of Goldwin Leathersham, her host.
+
+“Here comes the bride,” he shouted, as he piloted her about and
+introduced everybody to her.
+
+“This demure little beauty,” he said, “is Daisy Snow. Note her sweet,
+pure face and wide-eyed, innocent gaze.”
+
+“It is all so new--so wonderful--” Miss Snow breathed, “I'm a débutante,
+you know, and I have scarcely butterflied out of my chrysalis yet. How
+splendid the Leathershams are. He has a heart of gold. Oh, he is such
+a good man, he says his life motto is the Golden Rule.”
+
+“And Mrs. Leathersham?” asked Warble.
+
+“Marigold? Oh, yes, she's as good as gold, too. We're firm friends.”
+
+Warble was agog to mingle, so she moved on.
+
+Le Grand Paynter, a celebrated Cubic artist, fascinated her with his
+flowing locks, flowing tie and marvelous flow of conversation. He asked
+to paint her as a Semi-nude Descending a Ladder, but she only said she
+must refer him to her Petticoat.
+
+Freeman Scattergood, the well-known philanthropist was chatting with
+Mrs. Charity Givens, who was the champion Subscription List Header. Many
+had tried to oust her from this enviable position but without success.
+Near them stood Avery Goodman, the rector, and he was deeply engaged in
+a flirtation with Miss May Young, one of his choir girls.
+
+Manley Knight, a returned soldier, was resplendent with a Croix de
+Guerre, a Hot Cross Bun and many other Noughts and Crosses.
+
+Warble fingered them in her light way.
+
+“Isn't he splendid!” babbled Daisy Snow the _ingénue_; “Oh, how
+wonderful to offer one's life for glory! You can fairly see the heroism
+bubble out of his eyes!”
+
+“How you admire him!” said Warble.
+
+“Yes, but he doesn't care for me.”
+
+“Not specially,” admitted Manley Knight. “Yes,” Daisy said. “He thinks
+me too ignorant and unsophisticated--and I am. Now, there's Lotta Munn,
+the heiress--she's more in his line. But Ernest Swayne is devoted to
+Lotta. I think it will be a real love match--like the Trues.”
+
+“The Trues?” asked Warble, politely.
+
+“Yes,” and she glanced toward a very devoted looking pair sitting apart
+from the rest, on a small divan. “They're wonderful! Herman True is the
+most marvelous husband you ever saw. He never speaks to anyone but his
+wife. And she's just the same. She was Faith Loveman, you know. And
+they've been married two years and are still honeymoon lovers! Ah, what
+a fate!”
+
+Daisy sighed, a sweet little-girly sigh, and blushed like a slice of
+cold boiled ham.
+
+But this Who's Whosing was interrupted by a footman with a tray of
+cocktails.
+
+Daisy Snow refused, of course, as became a débutante so did Judge
+Drinkwater, who stood near by, frowning upon the scene, he being a
+Prohibitionist.
+
+A sickly looking lady next to him achieved several, and Warble asked
+Daisy who she might be.
+
+“Oh, that's Iva Payne--you met her, you know. She's very delicate,
+a semi-invalid, under the care of specialists all the time. I don't
+exactly know what her malady is, but it's something very interesting to
+the doctors. There's scarcely anything she can eat--I believe she brings
+her own specially prepared food to parties.
+
+“She seems to relish the cock-a-whoops all right,” Warble commented.
+
+“I understand the doctors prescribe stimulants for her--she is not at
+all strong. They give her artificial strength, she says.”
+
+“Yes, she seems to be strong for 'em. Don't you take any?”
+
+“Oh no! I'm a débutante. And mother says she wants to be with me when I
+take my first cocktail and smoke my first cigarette.”
+
+“Dear girl, Daisy, so fresh and unspoiled! Her mother is one of a
+thousand.”
+
+This from Manley Knight, who constituted himself Daisy's proxy in the
+matter of cocktails and drank all that would have been Daisy's had her
+mother permitted.
+
+Goldwin Leathersham seemed to be acting as proxy for some débutante
+also, for he seemed to feel pretty bobbish, but Warble was only slightly
+interested in the whole matter.
+
+She rolled her Wedgwooden eyes about, hoping the horde would be herded
+toward the dining-room. But no such luck.
+
+Instead they drifted in the opposite direction and, swept along with the
+crowd, Warble found herself in one of a serried series of gilt chairs,
+facing a platform as large as a theater stage.
+
+An erudite looking man who appeared on the platform received tumultous
+applause.
+
+“Who is he?” Warble whispered to her neighbor, who chanced to be Avery
+Goodman, “an impersonator?”
+
+“Lord, no; it's Wunstone, the great scientist--rants on Fourth Avenue
+dimensions, or something like that.”
+
+In a tone of forceful mildness the speaker began: “It must be conceded
+that, other things being equal, and granting the investiture of all
+insensate communication, that a psychic moment may or may not, in
+accordance with what under no circumstances could be termed irrelevancy,
+become warily regarded as a coherent symbol by one obviously of a
+trenchant humor. But, however, in proof of a smouldering discretion,
+no feature is entitled to less exorbitant honor than the unquenchable
+demand of endurance.
+
+“Though, of course, other things being equal, and granting the
+investiture of all insensate communication, no feature is entitled, in
+accordance with what under no circumstances could be termed irrelevancy,
+to become warily regarded as a coherent symbol. And doubtless in proof
+of a smouldering discretion, and in accordance with one obviously of a
+trenchant humor, it may or may not be warily regarded.
+
+“Though it cannot be denied that the true relevancy of thought to
+psychic action is largely dependent on the ever increasing forces of
+disregarded symbolisms. And this again proves the pantheistic power
+of doubt, considered for the moment and for the subtle purposes of our
+argument as faith. For, granting that two and two are six, the
+corollary reasoning must be that no premise is or may be capable of such
+conclusion as will render it sublunary to its agreed parallel.
+
+“But this view is ultra and should be adopted with caution.
+
+“We are therefore forced to the conclusion that pure altruism is
+impossible in connection with neo-psychology.”
+
+There was more, but it was at that point that Warble went to sleep.
+
+She was awakened later by the high notes of a celebrated Metropolitan
+soprano, who had consented to exchange a few of her liquid notes for
+Goldwin Leathersham's yellow-backed ones.
+
+Tired, hungry and sleepy, Warble fidgeted in her little gilt chair, but
+the music went inexorably on.
+
+It was followed by the appearance of a Neo Poet.
+
+This man wore eccentric dress of some sort, and as he waited for the
+applause to melt away, he stood, absent-mindedly picking crumbs out of
+his beard.
+
+By subtle hint of auto-suggestion this made Warble hungrier than ever
+and she looked around for Petticoat. But he was busy flirting with Daisy
+Snow, and it was not Warble's way to cut in.
+
+In hollow tones the performer read extracts, excerpts and exceptions
+from the works of Amy Lynn, Carl Sandpiper and Padriac, the Colyumist,
+and Warble went back to sleep.
+
+There was more, but no merrier, and when at last the platform was
+cleared for the last time, the guests were refreshed by the passing of a
+small glass of punch and a wafer to each.
+
+Then they went, with a flutter of silk stockings and twinkling slipper
+buckles, and a medley of shrieked goodbys.
+
+Warble and Petticoat reached home.
+
+“Howja like 'em?” he asked.
+
+“I'm so hungry,” she wailed.
+
+“Oh, Warble, you ought to be more careful about eating in public. It
+isn't done. Watch Iva Payne--she doesn't.”
+
+“Oh, Bill--” Warble began to cry. “I want to go back to the
+restaurant--”
+
+“No, no--now, Cream Puff, I didn't mean to lambaste you. But they're a
+smart crowd--”
+
+Warble let two tears rest, glistening, in her lower eyelashes, rolled
+up her eyes, pulled down the corners of her hibiscus flower mouth, and
+waited to be kissed.
+
+She was.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Up in Bill's bedroom. Gray silken walls, smoked pearl furniture, a
+built-in English bed, with gray draperies.
+
+Through a cloth of silver portiére, a bathroom done in gray rough stone.
+Oxidized silver plumbing exposure.
+
+No pictures on the walls, save one--a barbaric Russian panel by
+Larrovitch.
+
+At the windows, layers of gauze, chiffon, silk--all gray.
+
+A great circular divan was somewhere about, and as he sank down upon
+it and drew her with him into its engulfing down, he patched up the
+quarrel.
+
+“They took to you,” he said, “you went like hot cakes!”
+
+It was an unfortunate allusion, and Warble, smiling with an engaging
+smile, wheedled, “Pleathe, pleathe--”
+
+“No,” Petticoat said, inexorably, “if you eat all the time you'll get to
+look like that soprano. Howja like that?”
+
+“Do you care if I'm fat, Bill?”
+
+“Me? Why, I wouldn't care if you were as big as a house. You're
+my--well, you're my soulmate.”
+
+“Oh, I'm so had and glappy! It's sweet to be yours. You must excuse my
+appetite--you're the only husband I have. My own Pill Betticoat!”
+
+He kissed her in his eccentric fashion, and with her plump arms about
+his neck, she forgot all about Ptomaine Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Warble's own maid was named Beer.
+
+A French thing--so slim she seemed nothing but a spine, but supplied
+with slender, talkative arms and a pair of delicate silk legs that
+displayed more or less of themselves as the daily hint from Paris
+reported skirts going up or down as the case might be.
+
+A scant black costume and a touch of white apron completed the picture,
+and Warble played with her as a child with a new doll.
+
+Beer wanted to patronize Warble, tried to do so, but found it
+impossible. Her patronage rolled off of Mrs. Bill Petticoat like hard
+sauce off a hot apple dumpling.
+
+“Do you get enough to eat, Beer?” her mistress asked her.
+
+“Wee, maddum,” the maid replied, in her pretty War French. “I eat but a
+small.”
+
+“Well, don't drop to pieces, that's all,” warned Warble. As to personal
+care and adornment the hitherto neglected education of Warble Petticoat
+was in Beer's hands. And she handed it out with unstinted lavishness.
+
+That was the way things came to Warble; in slathers--in big fat chunks.
+In avalanches and rushing torrents.
+
+Beer engineered all her new wardrobe, and received sealed proposals for
+its construction.
+
+Beer taught her the mysteries of the toilette table, and once initiated
+into this entrancing art, Warble let herself go in the matter of
+cosmetics and make-ups, and could scarce wait for Beer's afternoon out,
+to dabble about by herself.
+
+Beer taught her how to wear jewelry, and directed what pieces she should
+ask Petticoat for next.
+
+Altogether, Warble was trying out things--but carefully, as a good
+housewife tries out lard.
+
+And she was not yet certain as to the results. Environment has to
+reckon, now and then with heredity.
+
+Warble, at soul, all for utility, economy, diligence and efficiency,
+transplated to Butterfly Center, with its keynote of careless idleness,
+waste motion and extravagance.
+
+One must win out. Had she a Dempsey of a heredity against a Carpentier
+of an environment? Or was it the other way round?
+
+She planned to reform Butterfly Center, to do away with the street
+statues, the useless patches of flowers; tear down and rebuild the
+ridiculous classic architecture of many of the shops and substitute
+good solid livable houses for the castles and châteaux, the barracks and
+bungalows that adorned the residence section.
+
+These reforms she meant to bring about shortly, but first, she must
+begin with her home.
+
+In her pride of being a Petticoat she loved every detail of Ptomaine
+Haul. Yet she knew it did not express herself, it was not the keynote of
+her own Warbling personality.
+
+What to do.
+
+She sat in her boudoir, its mauve walls and gold Japanese screens
+backgrounding her plump prettiness, as she lolled on a gold brocade
+_chaise longue_.
+
+She glanced out at the peacocks strutting in the Italian garden and
+listened to the rooks cawing in the cypresses between the marble urns on
+the terrace steps.
+
+It was a big proposition to change all that. To turn the bird sticks
+into pruning hooks and the bird baths into plowshares.
+
+Could she do it?
+
+Doubtful.
+
+She went out into the hall and looked over the rail of the great
+rotunda. Rugs hung from the rail, as it might be a Turkish Monday.
+
+Below, she could see the lake in the front hall, also she could glimpse
+the armored bronze Petticoats guarding the entrance that led to the
+corridor that led to the hall leading into the dining-room.
+
+It was well nigh hopeless.
+
+Warble sighed. Then she rang for Beer and ordered some French pastry and
+a cup of chocolate.
+
+Revived and revivified, Warble decided on a mad dash for reform.
+
+Ordering Beer to dress her quickly, she did all she could to help, and
+soon, in a daring combination of canary, black and coral, she was on her
+way to the shops.
+
+She achieved what is known as a utility box, and which is compounded of
+matting and a few bamboo strips.
+
+This she caused to be set up in her boudoir.
+
+Came Petticoat.
+
+No oral observations, but the next day an antique Florentine chest,
+carved by Dante, replaced the box.
+
+“Just as utile,” Bill remarked, “and a lot more expensive. Kiss me.”
+
+That is the way the Petticoats of this world decree, and that is the way
+the Warbles submit.
+
+That Thursday afternoon she was in love with her husband. She toddled
+into his room to talk to him. She was in pastel chiffon boudoir
+jambiéres picked out with rosebuds. She sat, cross-legged, on one of his
+gray satin floor pillows and looked up at him.
+
+Petticoat was just going out and he sat before the mirror, earnestly
+adjusting a hair net over his permanent.
+
+“Hello, _Fruit Mousse_,” he said, half absent-mindedly, as he went on
+adjusting.
+
+Big Bill Petticoat was far from being effeminate. He was found of
+aesthetics and anaesthetics, and his chief interests in life were beauty
+and his big bills.
+
+“What's the use of beauty, if a thing isn't useful?” Warble would ask,
+and Petticoat would reply, “What's the use of use, anyway? There's no
+use in having anything that isn't beautiful.”
+
+And as the house was under Petticoat rule, Big Bill won out.
+
+“You must have a party, Warble,” Petticoat said, as he fitted a long,
+slim cigarette into a long, slim holder.
+
+“I'd rather have a baby,” and she looked up at him inquiringly.
+
+“Honest, Warbie, I can't afford it. I've lots of money, but we take a
+lot of keeping ourselves, and to keep a baby means almost a whole
+extra establishment. Let's wait till I've saved up a bit, or we have a
+windfall. Leathersham owes me a small fortune for his cook's ptomaine
+cases--she's always getting poisoned with her imported canned
+things--but Goldie's slow pay, and too, I want to make a few
+improvements on the place. I'm thinking of bringing over a Moorish
+Courtyard intact--nice, eh?”
+
+“What's it good for?” demanded Warble. “We've done our courting, and
+anyway--look here, Bill, there's only three things I can do. Have a
+baby--”
+
+“Cut it out, Warb; I haven't the means just now. And it might be twins.”
+
+“That's so. Well, the second thing is to reform this town. It's going
+to the dogs--to little, silly Pekes and Poms. I can save it, and correct
+its ways and put it on a sound utilitarian basis.”
+
+“Don't believe you could do that.”
+
+“Can do. But the third trick is to flop over to their side and be like
+the town people myself.”
+
+Petticoat laughed outright.
+
+“Nixy on that, Warble, my duck. You'd have to reduce.”
+
+“I speck I should. Well, then the reform act for mine. I've got to do
+something, Pet, to keep amused and interested.”
+
+“That's what I said. Have a party.”
+
+“I will. And it will be part of the reform. These people are too
+highbrow. Too soulful. Too artistic--”
+
+“Warble! How many times have I told you _never_ to use that word! Now,
+look here, if you want to play at reforming, go ahead, nobody will
+interfere with you. But where'll you get time? You spend most of your
+waking hours in slumber, and the rest, eating. You're a sweet, lovely,
+cuddly thing, but if you keep on, some day you'll find you can't get
+your kimono together.”
+
+“Then I'll wear two. But, Bill, I'm not so big, you know.”
+
+Warble up, and parading the room with a martial air.
+
+“You're a perfect Bellona!” Petticoat said, smiling at her.
+
+“A Bologna! Oh, you horrid thing! But that reminds me I haven't had
+sausage lately. I must speak to cook. Now, about my party.”
+
+“Have a good one while you're about it. I might import a Spanish
+Ballet--”
+
+“You might do nothing of the sort! This is to be my party, and I shall
+run it to suit myself.”
+
+“All right, Tutti Frutti; you have no subtlety or poetry in your
+soul--indeed, I doubt if you have a soul--but you're a dear and a
+sweet--”
+
+“Bill, I've an idea! Build bureaus right down to the floor and then
+collar buttons can't roll under them!”
+
+“Fine idea! Better patent it. Must go. Goodby.”
+
+“Wait a minute. Mrs. Holm Boddy is coming to see me to-day. What's she
+like?”
+
+“Oh, she's a hen-minded Hetty with cabriole legs. Don't bother with her
+much. They're lower case people--tin pergola and pebble garden sort. And
+early Victorian bathrooms. You won't like her--freeze her out.”
+
+“All righty. Say--Billy dear--has you any choclums?”
+
+“Not for little gourmands,” he took her in his arms. “I say, Warbie, you
+promised to cut out sweets. Look here.”
+
+He led her to the picture gallery where his simpering or frowning
+ancestors looked down in painted disapproval.
+
+They were all slender--wasp-waisted ladies, long lean men. Not a fatty
+in the bunch.
+
+Big Bill said nothing, his painted morals adorned their own tale.
+
+“I don't care!” Warble exploded, angrily. “If you don't give me enough
+to eat, I'll leave your bed and board and put a notice in the paper. And
+you needn't flaunt your Petticoats in my face! I don't care _that_ for
+them!”
+
+She snapped a dimpled pink thumb and forefinger at the whole exhibit,
+made a face at the skinniest one of all, and then sneaked casually into
+Bill's arms.
+
+“Nice, nice,” she cooed, patting his mastoid process. “Run along now,
+and I'll plan my party.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+“That Boddy woman,” remarked Beer, as she dressed Warble; “she is a
+pest--a pill! Wait, Maddum, I beg you! I've only rouged one of your
+cheeks!”
+
+“That's enough,” said Warble, inattentively, and she danced down stairs
+to freeze out her caller.
+
+“I've been meaning to come for some time,” Mrs. Holm Boddy said, “but I
+thought I'd give you a chance to get a little used to your new grandeur.
+Quite a change for you, isn't it?”
+
+“No,” said Warble, “it's rather a come down. I've always been very
+grand. Tell me about yourself.”
+
+“Oh, I'm the old-fashioned wife and mother. Devoted to my home, and my
+family. I deplore the modern tendency to neglect one's own fireside.”
+
+“Yes, I should think you'd be happier there than anywhere else.”
+
+Warble gazed at her guest. She was a tall, angular woman, so gaunt that
+her bones rattled. Warble wondered if Bill would really like her to be
+like that.
+
+“Oh, I am. My dear husband, my darling children--you ought to have a lot
+of children, Mrs. Petticoat.”
+
+“Yes, I shall, when we can afford it. My husband isn't very well off
+just now, you see.”
+
+“You live very extravagantly. Look at those rugs, now. Rugs cost
+fearfully.”
+
+“Don't you have any?”
+
+“Oh, no. We don't waste money that way.”
+
+“Bare floors?”
+
+“No, carpets. More homey, you know. Nice Brussels in the parlor--real
+Body Brussels--Bigelow--and in the bedrooms, Ingrain. Oh, the hominess
+of a new-laid Ingrain carpet, with lots of fresh straw under it! You
+acquainted with Avery Goodman, the Rector?”
+
+“I've met him.”
+
+“Splendid man-spiritual-minded and all that. Fine preacher, too. Very
+soulful. I often sob right through his sermons. Better go hear him.”
+
+“My husband is a busy man--we haven't time for church.”
+
+“No, spose not. Doctors are kept on the jump. Specially specialists. And
+I know your husband is busy. Say, is there any truth in the report that
+he pays the grocers and delicatessen men to get--you know--doubtful
+canned goods, and not too fresh sea foods and all that--so there'll be
+more ptomaine cases?”
+
+“What a good idea!” Warble cried. “I had not heard of it, but if Bill
+does that he's more efficient than I thought him!”
+
+“I spose he's terribly in love with you?”
+
+“Bill? Oh, yes. We adore each other.”
+
+“I didn't know. The Petticoats are all so thin--”
+
+“Yes, a change is always pleasant.” Warble gave her engaging smile.
+
+“Maybe. That Daisy Snow now--she's so pretty _and_ slender. Dr.
+Petticoat seems mighty fond of her.”
+
+“Well, you know what doctors are. Nice to everybody, of course. There's
+no telling who'll have ptomaine poisoning next.”
+
+“Oh, yes, you can always tell that. It's sure to be Iva Payne. She's
+awful attractive, too. You must be worried about your man, Mrs.
+Petticoat.”
+
+“I do worry a lot. It keeps my flesh down. Tell me more to worry about.”
+
+“Well, there's Lotta Munn, of course. I suppose you haven't a fortune of
+your own?”
+
+“Oh, yes; I'm enormously rich in my own right.”
+
+“You are! Why, where did your husband get you?”
+
+“He got me out of a mail catalogue.” Warble made a face at her. “Must
+you go, Mrs. Boddy?” she rose. “I won't ask you to come again, as I know
+how you love your own home and fireside. Goodby.”
+
+Though Mrs. Holm Boddy put up a strong resistance, Warble pushed her out
+of the front door and slammed it after her.
+
+“That woman has left finger marks on my nice clean soul,” she said, as
+she went down to see the cook about the sausage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+She had reached the peak of excitement in a confident decision that her
+party should be a success.
+
+In the morning she interviewed the cook.
+
+“You can spread yourself on the feast, François,” she said, “have
+any old menu you like so long as it's edible and enough of it. But
+especially I want you to make for me one hundred custard pies.”
+
+The French chef looked puzzled. He was an expensive chef and part of his
+duty was to look puzzled at any plain-named dish.
+
+“But, Madame, I do not know ze custard pie. Is it a crême paté?”
+
+“No, it isn't a krame puttay, nor creamed potatoes, but cus-tard
+pie--see? _Pie_! Oh, don't stand there looking like a whitewashed clown!
+Get out of my way, I'll make them myself!”
+
+Flinging on one of the chef's jackets and aprons, Warble flew at the job
+and with a battalion of helpers breaking eggs and skimming cream, she
+herself tossed the flour and shortening together for the crust.
+
+Efficiency scored and in an incredibly short space of time eight dozen
+custard pies were cooling their heels in the pantry windows.
+
+“Not to be served with the supper,” Warble warned the butler, “when I
+want them brought in I'll tell you.”
+
+Beer dressed Warble for the party, Petticoat standing by and advising.
+
+The gown was a few wisps of henna-colored chiffon which fitfully blew,
+half concealed, half disclosed a scant slip of jade green satin.
+
+Flesh-colored stockings, Petticoat decreed, and henna slippers with
+carved jade buckles.
+
+“Now, her hair--” he mused, leaning on his folded arms over the back of
+a chair.
+
+He walked slowly round Warble.
+
+“Oh, wopse it up anyway,” he said, “and tangle some jade beads in it.
+She'll stand that.”
+
+His orders were carried out and Beer clasped her hands in silent ecstasy
+at the result of the combined efforts of herself and her master.
+
+“Some day, Warble,” Bill said, “I'll teach you how to dress becomingly.”
+
+“And I'll teach you how to undress becomingly,” said Beer, not wanting
+to be outclassed in her own game.
+
+Warble waved Petticoat out of the room, dismissed Beer with a simple
+“Get out!” and then quickly flung off the clothes she wore and hopped
+into a little frock of white organdie and cherries.
+
+She wadded some hair over each ear, piled up the rest in a moppy coil
+and crowned it with a wreath of cherries.
+
+The party came.
+
+“Good Heavens!” Warble thought, as she looked at the smart, bored crowd,
+“have I got to bring these hifalutin creatures down to earth? I don't
+know that I can make them laugh, but I'll give them a jolt!”
+
+She did.
+
+Her cherries bobbing, two long-stemmed ones held between her teeth, she
+flew around like a hen with its head off.
+
+“You see,” she explained, “it's a Mack Sennett party, everybody puts
+things down everybody's back. Like this--and here are the things.”
+
+From a tray brought by a footman, Warble selected a fuzzy caterpillar
+and turning quickly dropped it down inside the soft collar of Trymie
+Icanspoon, a poet, who _would_ dress as he pleased.
+
+He went into amusing spasms and everybody took something from the tray.
+There were cold raw oysters, bits of ice, thistles, cooked spaghetti and
+plain granulated sugar. They had to put them down the backs of the men
+only, because the fashionably dressed ladies hadn't any backs to put
+them down. You can't put an oyster down two crossed strings of pearls.
+
+It caused great hilarity to see the Reverend Goodman standing on his
+head, trying to lose a red-hot silver dollar; and Daisy Snow, whose
+débutante frock was available for the purpose, wriggled beneath the
+tickling crawling of a large but harmless spider.
+
+Warble was almost in hysterics over the funny antics of Goldwin
+Leathersham down whose loose and ample collar she had herself poured a
+glass of water on two seidlitz powders.
+
+“Next,” she cried, clapping her hands, “we'll have an artistic game.
+Here it comes.”
+
+Lackeys and minions brought in pails of kalsomine, of various tints,
+some of pale pastel shades, others of deep rich hues. One was given to
+each guest, and each was provided with a beautiful new whitewash brush.
+
+“Now,” Warble explained, her blue eyes dimpling with delight, “you each
+make a splash on the wall--a big, hit-or-miss splash. Then we each try
+to evolve a lovely picture by few bold strokes.”
+
+This was great fun.
+
+Manley Knight, with a mighty splash of color that landed on a Fragonard
+panel, had quite a good start for a “Storm at Sea.” He worked it up with
+fine technique and you would have been surprised at the result.
+
+Iva Payne took a splash from several different pails thereby achieving a
+Cubist landscape. It was entitled “High Tide off the Three-mile Limit,”
+ and was a startling success.
+
+Daisy Snow, timid little dear, made but a tiny daub and worked it up
+carefully.
+
+“That,” she said, “is a miniature of Big Bill.”
+
+All in all, it was gay sport, and even Mrs. Charity Givens took part,
+though she protested she was no artist and couldn't even draw a straight
+line.
+
+The next performance was a contest between Adam Goodsport and Avery
+Goodman.
+
+Bets were made on the two contestants before the betters knew what the
+scrap was to be.
+
+“It's a character sketch,” Warble explained. “Mr. Goodsport tries to
+blacken Mr. Goodman's character, while the Rector tries to whiten Mr.
+Goodsport's character.”
+
+Avery Goodman was then presented with a bag of flour and Adam Goodsport
+was handed a bag of soot.
+
+They went at it hand over fist, and in a few moments the blacking
+and whiting process was so complete that both were pronounced perfect
+transformations and all bets were off.
+
+Faces, hands and clothes were alike befloured and besooted, until
+Goodman was a veritable Blackamoor while Adam Goodsport looked like a
+Marcelline.
+
+A few eyebrows indicated a suspicion that Big Bill Petticoat's bride was
+a Little Mischief, but nobody said anything about it.
+
+“If I can only reform them,” Warble thought to herself, “if I can only
+make them like and enjoy this innocent fun instead of wearing their poor
+brains out over capitalled Art and Literature.”
+
+“Now,” she said, briskly, “we're going to play a game I learned in
+Shanghai. All take off your shoes and stockings. No one excused--come
+on--off with them.”
+
+Beer and a few other maids came in to assist the ladies, the men were
+properly valeted, and the barefooted crowd sat waiting further orders.
+
+Daisy Snow made a remark about being a maiden with reluctant feet, but
+nobody noticed it.
+
+Several seemed rather relieved than otherwise at the condition imposed
+upon them.
+
+“Now,” said Warble, but before she could go further, Adam Goodsport
+butted in with:
+
+“Oh, please, Mrs. Petticoat--oh, please! Such an opportunity! May never
+occur again! Oh, can't I--may I not--oh, dear lady, do say yes--”
+
+“Lordy, what do you want to do? Speak out, man!”
+
+“Why, you see, I am a solist--like a palmist you know--but as to feet.
+I studied solistry in Asia Minor and I know it from the ground up. Oh,
+please, Mrs. Petticoat, let me read your sole!”
+
+“Do,” cried Warble, “love to have you.”
+
+She plumped herself into a pillowed divan, and held her little pink feet
+straight out in front of her.
+
+Goodsport, sitting on a cushion at her feet, took one and scrutinized
+the sole.
+
+“The Solar system,” he began, “is interesting in the extreme. It was
+invented by Solon, though Platoe also theorized on the immortality of
+the sole. His ideas, however have been discarded by modern footmen.
+
+“Locke, is his treatise On the Human Understanding, discusses the
+subject fully and with many footnotes, and old Samuel Foote himself cast
+footlights on the subject.”
+
+“Now, looky here,” Warble objected, “I won't have a lecture in my house!
+I object to anything of an intellectural nature.”
+
+“This has nothing to do with the intellect,” Adam assured her. “Quite
+the reverse, now, you listen. It's really interesting. The palmist may
+claim to read the true character from the lines of the hand, but it is
+only by solistry that the real sole is laid bare and the character of
+a subject in any walk of life is exposed. The lines of the sole are
+greatly indicative of character, for all traits must draw the line
+somewhere. Now, Mrs. Petticoat, this line extending from the Mount of
+Trilby to the outer side of the sole is the life line. If that appears
+to be broken it indicates future death. If more pronounced on one sole
+than the other, it implies that the subject has one foot in the grave.
+You haven't, don't be alarmed. Here is the headline, straight and
+continuous, showing a long and level head.”
+
+“Ouch,” remarked Warble, “you tickle. Try somebody else,” and she drew
+her feet under her.
+
+“Me,” exclaimed Daisy Snow, coming over and holding out her dainty right
+foot.
+
+“H'm,” said Goodsport. “This line running from the Mount of Cinderella
+to the heel is the clothes line and denotes love of dress. This line
+crossing it is the fish line and shows you are incapable of telling the
+truth.”
+
+Daisy flounced away, mad, and Mrs. Charity Givens, with some
+trepidation, offered her ample and generous foot for dissection.
+
+“A thorough, broad understanding and a friendly footing toward all,”
+ declared the solist, “and no danger of misunderstanding. However, your
+broken headline indicates pugnacity.”
+
+“Nothing of the sort!” she snapped at him, and waddled away.
+
+Goldwin Leathersham, greatly interested, insisted on having his pedal
+interpreted.
+
+“Mount of Atalanta highly prominent,” said Goodsport, “that means
+you are a runner, either for office or for pleasure. Here is a line
+meeting--that indicates a railroad man. H'm. A well-developed football
+shows you have been to college. You seem to be inclined to solemates--”
+
+But Leathersham had taken to his heels.
+
+“Please,” said Iva Payne, gracefully offering her long psychic foot for
+perusal.
+
+“Ah, the poetic foot!” the soloist exclaimed. “There are two kinds
+of poetic feet--the Iambic and the Trochaic. You have one of each. In
+poetic feet the heels are often found in French forms. But poets are
+a footloose class and are often found with lame and halting feet. You
+don't seem to be a poet.”
+
+“Never said I was,” retorted Iva, shortly, and Warble said, “Stop this
+nonsense, it makes too much kicking. Now we're going to play the game I
+learned in Buda Pesth.”
+
+She led them to the picture gallery which had been prepared for the game
+by having many sheets of fly-paper placed on the floor, sticky side up.
+
+“It's Fly-paper Tag,” she said.
+
+It _was_ Fly-paper Tag--she was quite right.
+
+“You're it!” screamed Mrs. Givens as she pushed the minister over onto a
+sheet of fly-paper.
+
+“It yourself,” shrieked Leathersham adroitly shoving a sheet where he
+saw Mrs. Givens would light next.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Warble was certain she was a great reformer.
+
+Yet would these reformed people stay reformed?
+
+True, they were now in the spirit of her party, Mack Sennett himself
+couldn't have asked a better interpretation of his own vital principles.
+But had they come to realize that this after all was the real thing, the
+true ideal?
+
+Warble feared.
+
+* * * * *
+
+They were a stuck-up lot. The fly-paper had intrigued them all. Not only
+were they all half-soled with it but the merry wags had decorated the
+ladies' bare backs and the men's coated backs, until all looked like
+sandwich men or peripatetic ragpickers.
+
+Trymie Icanspoon crowned Mrs. Charity Givens with a fresh sheet of
+tanglefoot and Warble hilariously made a foolscap of another for the
+Rector's bald head. Judge Drinkwater folded Daisy Snow's two little
+hands together, then wrapped them tightly in fly-paper, and shook with
+laughter to see her futile attempts to get free.
+
+“Naughty man!” she cried, “to make poor little me so helpless!” With
+a spring she flung her entangled hands over the Judge's head, and hung
+round his neck like a pretty little millstone.
+
+Warble relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired and very hungry.
+
+But she was the stuff of which true reformers are made and Martin Luther
+had nothing on her.
+
+Then Beer came tripping in with a pile of varicolored garments which she
+held up to view.
+
+“These,” Warble announced, “are the real Mack Sennett costumes. They
+are one-piece bathing suits, I got them from an importer of contraband
+goods. You are to put them on in place of your clothes. And please
+forget that you are Butterflies and turn into bathing beauties and
+champion swimmers.”
+
+While they were shyly getting into the suits, she donned her own, a
+little scalloped apron effect, with cross-strapped sandals, and a silk
+bandanna knotted round her head.
+
+She glanced about and saw Big Bill Petticoat beaming with proud glee at
+his wife's social success, and looking lovely himself in a black satin
+one-piece, with jet shoulder straps.
+
+For a second Warble could see only Petticoat's pink cheeks and perfected
+eyebrows. Then she shook off the spell and keyed up.
+
+“We're going to have an obstacle race,” she announced, “all over the
+house. You must follow me, wherever I go. I shall lead you a dance! And
+then I shall come last to the lake in the front hall, and whoever is
+nearest me there, will be rewarded.”
+
+Yet even as she spoke, she overheard Trymie whispering to Iva Payne,
+“Yes, I believe that the new art era into which we are now slipping,
+will worship beauty for itself alone, and that art, sublimated by--”
+
+She turned away, sick at heart.
+
+Why bother, her tortured soul cried out. Yet the irrepressible impulse
+of reform egged her on and it was a perfectly good egg.
+
+She flew past Petticoat, only pausing to shout, “Like it all, my tramp?
+Yes, it _is_ an expensive party.”
+
+Then she led her followers a mad race. Sliding down banisters, squeezing
+into dumb waiters; crawling under beds and out the other side; jumping
+in and out again of bathtubs full of perfumed water. Out of windows, in
+at scuttles. Through booby-traps of half-open doors, on the lintel of
+which were perched pans full of live crabs or little boxes of mice.
+
+On rushed the horde, Mrs. Givens panting from over exertion, Goldie
+Leathersham limping because of a crab hanging to his great toe.
+
+On they went, and at last, as Warble drew up at the lake in the hall,
+she was closely followed by Trymie Icanspoon, and true to her promise
+she rewarded him by pushing him into the lake. It was but a shallow
+pool, he couldn't drown, but the fun of it was, Warble had caused the
+water to be drained off and the tank filled with mayonnaise.
+
+Wherefore Trymie's soft plop into the oily depths was of a ludicrous
+nature.
+
+Then the guests were allowed to resume their own clothes and supper was
+announced.
+
+Conversation turned to art matters, and Leathersham who was a collector
+of many various rarities asked Petticoat how his new collection was
+progressing. The collection was one of early American Pieplates.
+
+“Doing well,” Big Bill answered. “I have just achieved a yellow earthen
+John Adams, that is authentic and very rare. Except for my Barbara
+Frietchie tin one, it is perhaps the gem of my collection.”
+
+“Good!” Leathersham exclaimed, interestedly, “may I see it?” Petticoat
+summoned a lackey and two minions and sent them to his curio room to
+fetch the plates. But they returned with the startling announcement that
+all the pieplate collection had disappeared!
+
+“Heavens and earth!” Petticoat cried. “Lock the doors, search the
+pockets! Why, that collection is worth millions!”
+
+“What's the matter?” Warble inquired, seeing the hullaballoo. “Oh,” as
+she was told, “I used those plates, dear. I was making a lot of pies and
+our pieplates gave out.”
+
+“Making a lot of pies?” Petticoat repeated, wonderingly, while Marigold
+Leathersharn murmured, “How quaint!” in a supercilious way.
+
+“Yes,” went on Warble, unperturbed. “Want to see 'em?”
+
+They did, and all went to look at the eight dozen custard pies in the
+pantry windows.
+
+“Whoopee!” shouted Petticoat, “here's where I take the helm! Cut out the
+rest of the formal supper, and let's have a pie eating contest.”
+
+It warmed the cockles of Warble's heart to see how they all fell in with
+this suggestion. Could it be? Was she really having some effect on their
+terrible aestheticism at last?
+
+Absorbed in her thoughts, she ate her pies and when the contest was over
+the prize was awarded to Warble Petticoat. “Oh,” she cried, astounded.
+“I wasn't in the game at all! The hostess never should be. I was just
+eating what I wanted.”
+
+“You're a dear,” Marigold Leathersham said to her. “I'm going to love
+you. How your husband must adore you, you pretty thing.”
+
+“Yes, he does.” Warble stated. “At least, he says so.”
+
+“He's a truthful man,” Marigold declared, “you'd know that just to look
+at him. There's something in his face just now--”
+
+“It's pie,” said Warble, “he's very fond of it.”
+
+To Warble's great delight there were enough pies left for her final
+entertainment.
+
+“Folks,” she said, “this is a Mack Sennett party, and it wouldn't be
+complete without throwing custard pies. So we will choose sides.”
+
+Judge Drinkwater and Goldwin Leathersham were made captains and they
+chose sides.
+
+The party being thus divided, they bombarded each other with custard
+pies after the manner of certain comedians, till there wasn't a round of
+ammunition left.
+
+Then Iva Payne said she felt sick and wanted to go home and of course
+just for that they all had to go.
+
+“The nicest party ever!” they chorused at parting. “So novel and
+_naïve_--so quite entirely out of the ordinary.”
+
+As the last pied guest disappeared she turned wearily to her Petticoat.
+
+“I tell you, Warb,” he said, “you are sure one corker! You put 'em to
+sleep all right! Now you've shown 'em how, you bet they won't go on
+having their stupid highbrow intellectural old gatherings. Hop along to
+bed, little tired Lollipop.”
+
+His long lithe arms gathered her forcefully to him, and her irritation
+at his strength was lost in her admiration of his grace and skill in
+imparting affection.
+
+* * * * *
+
+From _The Butterfly Centerpiece_:
+
+The Mack Sennett party at the home of Dr. Bill Petticoat was a hundred
+per cent success. Little Lady Petticoat is nobody's fool. She knows that
+a lucky punch is her only chance. A short, swift hook, straight from the
+shoulder. The pretty Warble is a perpetual promise of joy, yet she shows
+symptoms of curvature of the soul--and it is, so far, a toss-up whether
+she will have her passport _viséd_ or be given the gate.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The week after, the Leathershams gave a party. The gilt-chaired audience
+listened to Sable Caviaro the new Russian violinist and Slubber D.
+Gullion, who discoursed on the Current Trend of Current Bolshe Vikings.
+
+The refreshing episode consisted of champagne and Saratoga chips.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The Restless Sexteen was the record altitude of Butterfly Center. It was
+the elect and select of the intellect; it was the whole show--the very
+Wholly of Whollies. To belong to it was canonization. Though some of its
+members also belonged to the Toddletopsis Club, it meant their leading a
+double life.
+
+The Restless Sexteen were mostly young married women with their husbands
+as nonresident members.
+
+They studied higher psychology and broader psychopathy. The wrestled
+with and threw Einstein and let themselves dream again with Freud.
+Psychoanalysis was their washpot, and over the fourth dimension did they
+cast their shoes.
+
+Their afternoon digest was held at Faith Loveman's and Warble went.
+
+The Loveman home was an abstract bungalow, which showed rather plainly
+the iron hand in the velvet glove influence of the Japanese.
+
+The large light hall had a built-in abstract table, and on this was an
+enormous bronze plaque which held a thin layer of water on which rested
+one pansy.
+
+Faith's devotion to the Doctrine of Elimination allowed nothing else
+in the hall, but in the living room there were three whole pieces of
+furniture besides, of course, the caterer's gilt chairs brought in to
+hold the restless sex as they tried to rest from their restlessness.
+
+Faith Loveman looked curiously at Warble.
+
+“You can't be very restless,” she observed, “you'd be thinner.”
+
+Warble smiled engagingly.
+
+“I do want to be thinner,” she conciliated, “how can I?”
+
+And, somehow, that started them all off. They restlessly gave advice,
+recommended certain exercises, uncertain drugs and most unattractive
+diets.
+
+They told their own experiences, extolled or berated their masseuses,
+scribbled addresses of corsetieres for one another, and in their
+interest and restless excitement they forgot all about Warble and she
+wanted to go home.
+
+But she had her mission to perform, and she waited until they restlessly
+changed the subject.
+
+They discussed current plays and seemed to get out of them far more than
+the author ever put in. They talked of a picture exhibit at the Gauguin
+Galleries, but this was as Choctaw to Warble; not a word could she
+understand.
+
+“Are you of the cognoscenti?” asked Faith Loveman of Warble. “I know
+all about art but I don't know what I like,” she returned, blushing
+prettily.
+
+“Oh, we'll teach you that. That's what this club is for, to help us to
+find ourselves, to give our restlessness an outlet to express the ego in
+our cosmos and illumine the dark patches of our souls. We're riding the
+pace that kills, living at the tension that snaps, blowing the bubble
+that breaks. We need an outlet--a vent--you understand?”
+
+“Yop,” said Warble, “your soul pressure is too high.”
+
+“But we want it high--we love it high--we're restless--we're keyed up,
+taut-strung, and hungry for soul food.”
+
+“I s'pose that's the only kind you have at these meetings.”
+
+Faith Loveman stared so hard that Warble made a face at her and went
+home.
+
+* * * * *
+
+She reflected.
+
+“It was my fault. I might have known restless people wouldn't eat. And I
+knew I couldn't bite on their restless sex problems. A big one seems to
+be how to get thin and how to stay so. They were all ready to drop the
+high sign babble for that! But all women are. They took it up again.
+
+“Can I reform them? Or shall I be sucked in, like Italians eat
+spaghetti, and my personality absorbed by the Butterflies, till I
+forswear all I stand for--all my utilitarian ideals shattered, all my
+prosaic hopes dashed, all my common sense wrenched from me, and my
+poor little brain-pan filled with the soul-mash of these high-strung
+sexaphones?”
+
+She ignored Beer's offer to undress her, she ran upstairs to an
+unfrequented bathroom, and flinging off her clothes, she got into the
+tub and wept in terror, her body a round pink blob in the briny water.
+
+But, thought the poor child, it's the most sensible place to cry.
+
+When Petticoat came home she said:
+
+“Honeybunch, let me in on your professional secrets. Tell me more about
+your most interesting cases. It might make me restless.”
+
+“Nothing much to tell. Life just one ptomaine after another. Cases all
+alike except for the primal cause.”
+
+“Well, tell me something. Where've you been just now?”
+
+“Over to Iva's. She had 'em again. Ripe olives. Getting better. Where
+you been?”
+
+“To the Restless Sexteen Club.”
+
+“Like it?”
+
+“I don't get it. They talk about things that aren't there. But I think I
+could make them see--”
+
+“Oh, cut it out, Warble. You'd dust books so hard, you'd dust off the
+gilt edges. They're deep-sea thinkers, that bunch--let 'em alone. What'd
+they talk about?”
+
+“About a book called 'Painted Shawls' or something, and about
+Thyco-Serapy, and about a play called 'The Housebroke Heart.' Take me to
+see it, will you, Bill?”
+
+“You wouldn't like it. You'd prefer the movies.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+Four days later, Daisy Snow called and gave Warble a jolt or two.
+
+“Huh, sizing me up, are they?” Warble sniffed. “Looking at me through
+the footle, distorted little microscope of their own silly scrubby
+little souls! Pooh, they couldn't, one of them, make a decent puff
+paste!”
+
+“But we can get cooks to do that. The Intelligentsia seek for the rare
+essence of thought, for colored words and perfumed cadences--”
+
+“There, there, Daisy, don't try me too far! What did Lotta Munn say
+about me?”
+
+“Oh, she didn't say much. Just that you're too stout and you haven't
+any ideals and you don't know a picture from a hole in the wall, and she
+thinks a man like Dr. Petticoat is wasted on you.”
+
+“Huh, she used to like Bill herself, didn't she?”
+
+“Does yet. She's poisoned nearly as often as Iva Payne is.”
+
+“H'm; anybody else after Bill?”
+
+“Only May Young.”
+
+“And you.”
+
+“Oh, me! I'm just a débutante. I'm not after anybody yet.”
+
+“Well, you keep off my Petticoat preserves! That Big Bill person is
+mine--and I won't stand for any nonsense about that.”
+
+“My goodness, Warble, I didn't know you had so much spunk. Lotta says
+you haven't any.”
+
+“She'll find out! Go on, what else did the cats say?”
+
+“They made fun of your party--”
+
+“Oh, my party! That I tried to make so nice and gay and festive!”
+
+“They thought those bathing suits were--er--rather bizarre--”
+
+“I _didn't_ get them out of the Bazar! I thought it all up myself. And
+they made fun of it! Go home, Daisy Snow, I've got to reflect.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+Like a very small, very spanked child, she crawled upstairs on her hands
+and knees.
+
+It was not her father she wanted now, but an old Petticoat ancestor,
+dead these two hundred years. Petticoat was dawdling on a _chaise
+longue_, absorbed in a small mirror, and wondering whether one more
+hair out of each eyebrow would strengthen the arch from a purely
+architectural viewpoint.
+
+“What's the trouble?” Warble asked, “broken down arches?”
+
+“Nope, guess they're all right.”
+
+“Say, Bill,” and she crept into the hollow of his chest, “are folks
+talking about me?”
+
+“They sure are.”
+
+“What do they say?”
+
+“Well, I hate to stir up trouble, but since you began it, I may as
+well own up they think you're just about as lowbrow as they come. And I
+s'pose you are.”
+
+“Oh, well. And what about the girls? Are they jealous of me?”
+
+“Sort of. Lotta says if you cut her out with Trymie Icanspoon, she'll
+elope with me.”
+
+“And will she?”
+
+“Not if I reach the ticket office first. Besides, I like Iva better.”
+
+“Oh, Bill, don't you love me any more?”
+
+“Course I do, Little Fudge Sundae. But a popular doctor has
+responsibilities.”
+
+“I know. I don't mean to be unreasonable. But let's keep peace in the
+family as long as it's convenient--see what I mean?”
+
+“I see. Do you think I'd like my new pajims better trimmed with frilled
+malines, or just decorated with a conventional pattern of gold soutache
+braid?”
+
+Warble, sitting on the other end of the now separated _chaise longue_
+made no reply, except to scratch her leg a little.
+
+Petticoat yawned, took a stroll round the room, tried on a new dressing
+gown, mixed himself a highball, smoked three cigarettes, glanced through
+“What the Swell-dressed Man can Spare,” wound his watch, put out his
+Angora cat, yawned again, sneezed twice, stomped out in the hall and
+back, and then went and stood in front of the fireplace, teetering on
+his heels.
+
+But until he bawled, “Aren't you ever going to clear out?” she sat,
+unmoving.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Lotta Munn ran in occasionally. She was of the anecdotal type. The
+stories she told made one gasp. They were always prefaced by an “Oh, my
+dear, I can't tell you _that_ one--it's _too_ awful!”
+
+Warble didn't care much for these tales, indeed, frequently missed the
+point, and laughed purely from a sense of duty.
+
+As she observed to Petticoat, one day, in exasperation, “There are only
+two classes of women in this world--women who tell naughty stories, and
+women I have never met!”
+
+Also Lotta Munn was by way of being complimentary. She told Warble that
+old Leathersham thought her a peach, and that Trymie Icanspoon declared
+he was going to make love to her.
+
+That Mrs. Charity Givens had heard she was a great heiress, and meant
+to stick her for a new hospital. That Le Grand Paynter wanted to do her
+portrait, life size and full width, and that the Reverend Avery Goodman
+said she was very light on her feet for a fat woman.
+
+The last made Warble mad and she made a face at Lotta and sent her home.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A rose-colored June day. Meringues of cloud floating on a sky of
+cerulean custard.
+
+She crawled out for a walk. It was ninety-eight in the shade, too hot to
+run much.
+
+She walked down Ptomaine Street, her nose shining, and pearly drops
+chasing each other down her back like rain on a car window pane.
+
+In her tucked white dimity and ankle-ties, her pink sunbonnet and her
+tiny, frilled parasol, she was as much out of place in the aesthetic
+town as whipped cream on a grapefruit.
+
+She circled the outskirts of the town, and noted the massive and
+imposing gateways to the great estates. She knew the grandeur inside,
+she had been there. Cubist landscapes, some of them, others were Russian
+steppes, and in one instance a magnate was having the ruins of an
+Egyptian temple excavated on his grounds, which he had previously with
+difficulty and at great expense had buried there.
+
+She did not know what to do about it.
+
+She felt, intuitively, that these men would resent her criticism of
+their homes. Yet she couldn't let it go on--this gigantic inutility,
+this mammoth lack of practical, efficient management.
+
+Why, the ground sunk in a sunken garden would raise crops enough to feed
+an army--and Lord knew how soon they might be needed.
+
+And then she happened to think that reform, like charity should begin at
+home, and she decided to start in on Petticoat.
+
+She did.
+
+* * * * *
+
+They were sitting in their home-like Tower of Jewels, and, a bit
+timidly, Warble said, “Let's pote quoetry to each other.”
+
+Poor child, nervousness or emotion always made her reverse her initial
+letters.
+
+“All right,” Petticoat returned, good naturedly, “you begin.”
+
+Just what Warble wanted! Fate was always good to her.
+
+“I will, because I hope to reform your tastes, dear, and teach you to
+see the beauty of simple beautiful poetry. Listen to this:
+
+  “Weep and the world weeps with you,
+  Laugh and you laugh alone--”
+
+“That'll do, Warb. Don't go too far. Now it's my turn. But, you know,
+dear, quoting isn't everything. You must learn to dissect, to interpret,
+and above all to trace the influences that swayed the poet.
+
+“Now I'll read you a poem picked at random, and then I'll trace the
+influences for you.”
+
+Petticoat reached out a languid arm, picked up a current magazine and
+read:
+
+  “'FULFILMENT
+
+  'Here, at your delicate bosom, let death
+  Come to me
+  Where night has made a warm Elysium,
+  Lulled by a soft, invisible sea.
+
+  'Now in the porches of your soul I stand
+  Where once I stood;
+  Fed and forgiven by a liberal hand,
+  My broken boyhood is renewed.
+
+  'You are my bread and honey, set among
+  A grove of spice;
+  An ever brimming cup; a lyric sung
+  After the thundering battle-cries.
+
+  'You are my well-loved earth, forever fresh,
+  Forever prodigal, forever fond,
+  As, from the sweet fulfilment of the flesh,
+  I reach beyond.'”
+
+Noting that Warble was still awake, Petticoat discoursed:
+
+“In the first line, we note the influence of Swinburne. There could be
+no better start out. The Swinburne collocation of delicate bosom and
+death is both arrestive and interesting. The third and fourth lines
+denote the influence of Poe. To be sure, 'a warm Elysium' sounds like
+a new and appetizing soft drink, but that is not what is meant; and the
+sea is indubitably the one that sounded around the tomb of Miss Annabel
+Lee.
+
+“The second stanza opens under pure Tennysonian influences. This may
+not be clear at first to the beginner in influence tracing, but it
+is unmistakably so to the expert. The recurring sibilants, the sound
+without sense, the fine architectural imagery, all point to the great
+Lady Alfred. The latter half of this stanza is due entirely to the
+strong influence of D. W. Griffith. The poem was, without doubt, written
+after the poet had been to see 'Broken Blossoms,' and the liberal
+hand from which that production was flung to a waiting world left its
+ineffaceable finger-prints on his polished mind.
+
+“Now we come to stanza three. The first line shows the influence of
+Mother Goose; the second is an unconscious echo of Solomon's Song; the
+ever-brimming cup owes itself to Omar; and the rest of the stanza to
+Rupert Brooke.
+
+“Thus we see the importance of widespread reading, and a catholicity of
+influences.
+
+“Influence is wonderful! To invent a new simile, it is like a pebble
+dropped into a placid lake; the ripples form ever-widening circles, and
+the influence of an influence is never wholly lost.
+
+“Perhaps--and this is quite as it should be--the final stanza is the
+finest of all. It starts out under the influences of Walt Whitman. Had
+Walt been omitted, the whole structure would have tumbled to the ground!
+No self-respecting poet now-a-days writes without being influenced by
+Whitman. It isn't done. It would be as indiscreet as to appear in one's
+shirt-sleeves. The influence of the good, gray Poet _must_ be felt, must
+be _shown_, or the budding bard is out of the running. Only a dash
+of Whitman is needed--'my well-loved earth' and 'prodigal' are quite
+sufficient.
+
+“'The sweet fulfilment of the flesh' is a final roundup that gracefully
+blends Whitman's and Ella Wheeler Wilcox's influential powers--and,
+incidentally, justifies the magnificent title of the poem.
+
+“Then, as a crowning triumph, note the splendid last line, a masterpiece
+brought about by the influence of Sir Oliver Lodge and his spiritistic
+ilk! Could anything be finer? What imagery for a last line! What a
+break-off, leaving the gasping reader in a state of choking suspense,
+of avid, ungratified curiosity! A great poem indeed, and influenced by a
+noble army of writers.
+
+“Nor is the manner of the thing all that matters. The theme--the great
+idea of the whole affair--is a marvelous example of influence. The New
+York State Legislature recently passed a bill making attempted suicide
+no longer a punishable offense. If successful, it is, like virtue,
+its own reward. Indeed, it has to be, for as the Penal Code distinctly
+states, owing to the impossibility of reaching the successful
+perpetrator no forfeiture is imposed. But the new law lifts the ban from
+futile efforts in the matter of self-destruction, and one need not pay
+the hitherto exacted fine of a thousand dollars by way of a luxury tax
+on such diversion.
+
+“Can it be doubted, then, that our Poet read of this new law, and--it
+may be unconsciously--was so influenced by it that he devoted sixteen
+lines of his precious verse to the expression of his willingness to let
+death come to him?”
+
+“I don't blame him for being willing, and I wouldn't put a straw in
+Death's way,” said Warble, earnestly. “I'm glad you read me that, Bill,
+for that is just the sort of thing I mean to eradicate from your system.
+It's like a disease, this aestheticism of yours--it's the Culture
+Ptomaine.”
+
+“Now, hold on, Dumpling Dear, do you know a culture from a ptomaine?”
+
+“Oh, I don't mean the cultures you take, I mean Culture with a big C.
+It's a poison, and as you cure ptomaine poisoning, I'm going to cure
+this town of its deadly art poisoning. I'm in revolt.”
+
+“That's right, everybody who is anybody is in revolt against something
+nowadays, because our knowledge of the truth is too great for our
+existing conditions, and it bursts--”
+
+  “Like poor Betsy Binn, who was so very pure within,
+  She burst this outer shell of sin,
+  And hatched herself a cherubim!”
+
+Warble interrupted.
+
+“Yes, or as Gertrude Stein puts it: 'It is a gnarled division, that
+which is not any obstruction, and the forgotten swelling is certainly
+attracting. It is attracting the whiter division, it is not sinking to
+be growing, it is not darkening to be disappearing, it is not aged to
+be annoying. There cannot be sighing. This, is bliss.' There you see how
+art is greater than life--how--”
+
+“Do you think I'm too fat?” Warble again interrupted him.
+
+“I do, my dear. You weren't, I think you are, I know you will be.”
+
+“Would you love me more if I were--didn't weigh so much?”
+
+“Yes, in exact inverse ratio.”
+
+Warble made an awful face at him, and then she went quietly around
+behind him, and dropped down his back a little fuzzy caterpillar, which
+she had tied in her handkerchief for that very purpose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was her last effort to cure her husband of culture poisoning, but she
+was not yet ready to give up her big idea of reforming Butterfly Center.
+
+Warble was a determined little person, and, too, fate often gave her a
+good boost, and she thought one was about due.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She went to the Toddletopsis Club, at Lotta Munn's.
+
+Lotta had inherited eight or ten town and country houses, and for the
+moment was perched like a bird of passage, on her Roman villa, called
+Seven Hills.
+
+Warble's little electric Palanquin rolled through the arch of
+Constantine and she ascended the dazzling flight of marble steps to the
+entrance patio.
+
+“Hello, Pot Pie,” screamed Lotta, by way of greeting, “come on in, the
+firewater's fine.”
+
+It was, and there was lots of it, and a group of long silk-legged
+Butterflies were sprawled on the Roman couches, smoking and chatting as
+they spun the Toddletops.
+
+Warble was unfamiliar with the teetotum-like things, but the others
+kindly instructed her. Moreover, there was a roulette wheel and some
+other devices of which our litle heroine didn't even know the name.
+
+Also, there were tables, where those who chose played high-staked
+bridge, poker or rum.
+
+Warble wasn't a born gambler. Games of chance had no appeal for her. She
+wanted to make faces at everybody and run away. But she scolded herself
+for being too superior and forced herself to stay with the bunch.
+
+In a way, she was rewarded, for she won all the money from the others.
+Her luck was monumental. Every different game she tried she took all the
+stakes, and at last having broken the bank, she was forced to go home
+for lack of occupation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was a proud and stuck-up chit all the evening.
+
+Trymie Icanspoon called and flirted something fierce. But it didn't mean
+a thing to Warble, for the man was so saturated with art that it oozed
+forth in his conversation and she had no idea what he was driving at.
+
+He went home thinking she was the most deliciously tempting morsel he
+had ever seen and the biggest fool.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“No, I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, as a gift-book, but
+he's no man. Could I kiss him? Not with a real movie kiss.
+
+“They say marriage is a lottery. I haven't drawn much. I mean in the
+matter of love. I wish I had a Prince Charming. Bill would do, all
+right, but he thinks I'm too fat. I wish I could get thinner--all of
+them are. Lotta's like a golf club and Daisy's like a breadstick.
+
+“I s'pose they were born that way.
+
+“I wasn't.
+
+“I wonder when we'll begin to keep a family.
+
+“I'm crazy about Bill--I am--I am--
+
+“Am I?
+
+“All the girls are, too.
+
+“Does he care for them? For any of them? For all of them?
+
+“For that detestable Daisy? That disgusting Iva? That rotten Lotta!
+
+“Oh, I may as well admit it--I just adore Bill!
+
+“This frock is too tight--I must have it stretched.
+
+“Yes, I'm mad over my husband--but--”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She sought Petticoat in his rooms.
+
+She tumbled into his lap, and he pushed her out until he could set aside
+the Angora cat and the Airedale and his pet guinea pig, then he said
+politely, “Is this your seat?” and she perched on his knee.
+
+“Do you love me, dear?” she asked, her voice full of a dumb pathos.
+
+“Ooooooooooooooooooo! I'm sleepy,” he said, with a cavernous yawn and a
+Herculean stretch that threw her out on the floor. “Want any money?” She
+looked at him. He was not unlike John Barrymore in The Jest, and Warble
+fell for him afresh.
+
+“You are so beautiful--” she wailed. “I wish you loved me--”
+
+“I wish I did,” he returned, honestly, “but you are such a butter-ball.”
+
+“Oh, Butterfly Thenter calls anybody Butter-ball who weights over
+ninety-five! If you're so cut up about it I won't live under this roof
+another minute! I can earn my own living, and all I want, too! You can
+get a divorce and marry some thread of a woman who has ptomaines all the
+time!”
+
+“Pish, tush, Warb, don't be a damfool! Lay off the melodrama. I do love
+you--at least, I love ninety-five pounds of you. Now, will you be good?”
+
+“Yeth.”
+
+“And will you try to think of me as a devoted and loving husband, even
+if I'm not one?”
+
+“Oh, my dear, I am unjust to you! I will take what you give me--what you
+can spare from the little dog and the cat and the guinea pig. And I will
+be your own little Petty Warblecoat. And I won't give you over to Iva
+Payne--I hate her!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+The mail.
+
+The Petticoats rarely received mail. It wasn't done much in Butterfly
+Center. So unaesthetic.
+
+On a tray, a lacquered lackey brought a letter to Warble.
+
+A white letter. Large and square--ominously square.
+
+Warble took tray and all and went with it to Petticoat's rooms--the
+letter was addressed to him.
+
+She tapped but there was no answer. Listening at the door, she could
+hear him splashing in his rock-hewn bath and leaping, chamois-like, from
+crag to crag of his quarried bathroom.
+
+She sat down on the floor and waited. Petticoat's toilets were like
+linked sweetness, long drawn out.
+
+It was late afternon, before he emerged, fresh, roseate and smiling,
+and imprinted a kiss on Warble's cheek that left the red stamp of a
+lip-sticked mouth. Warble sometimes thought if it could be arranged as a
+dating stamp, she could keep a record of when he had last kissed her.
+
+Poor little Warble--she loved her Big Bill so fondly, and he only looked
+on her as something fatter than his dog, a little bigger than his cat.
+Timidly she proffered the trayed letter.
+
+“Oh, my Heavens!” and Petticoat smote himself, hip and thigh. “Where
+did you get this? Why was I not told sooner of its arrival? To me! And
+postmarked Lake Skoodoow-abskoosis! Home of my ancestors! Woman! Why
+this delay? _Why_?”
+
+“It came this morning,” said Warble, apologetically, “but you were in
+your bath, and the door was locked.”
+
+“But this is a most important letter. Why didn't you slip it under the
+door?”
+
+“I couldn't,” said Warble, simply, “it was on a tray.”
+
+“As I hoped--I mean, feared--” exclaimed Petticoat, tearing the envelope
+from the sheet, “he is dead!”
+
+It made Warble writhe to see the devastated envelope--she always slit
+them neatly with a paper-knife--but she was thrilled by Petticoat's
+excitement.
+
+“A fortune!” he exclaimed. “My revered ancestor, the oldest of the
+Cotton-Petticoats, has died and left all his wealth to me! A windfall!
+Now we can afford to have a baby and get over the Moorish Courtyard,
+too! Oh, Warble, ain't we got fun!”
+
+He danced about the room, in his blue burnous and red tarbush, looking
+more like a howling dervish than a tempestuous Petticoat.
+
+Warble thought a minute. A baby would be nice--and perhaps she could
+reform that more easily than she could older people.
+
+“All right,” she said, “and I'll have beautiful gaternity mowns
+of shuffy fliffon--I mean, fliffy shuffon, no--shiffy fluffon--oh,
+pleathe--pleathe--”
+
+Warble's tongue always misbehaved when she was excited or embarrassed,
+but Petticoat didn't notice her.
+
+“I can send Roscoe Rococo after that Courtyard,” he mused, “he'll know.
+The last man I sent to Spain for a casemented façade, brought home a
+temple! But Roscie knows, and he'll do it proper. I don't want to run
+over just now--”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The baby was coming.
+
+Warble reveled in infant layettes and her own layouts for lying in. She
+sank deeper and deeper in a sea of baby-clothes, down pillows and orris
+powder. Nursery quarters were added to the house, influenced by Lucca
+Delia Robbia and Fra Angelico.
+
+Also a few influential Madonnas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Butterflies came in with advice. Marigold Leathersham was dubious
+about the wisdom of the plan, but brought a pillow of antique rose
+point, filled with ostrich plumes.
+
+Mrs. Holm Boddy rushed over with a copy of _Poems Every Expectant Mother
+Ought to Know_, and Lotta Munn sent a card of diamond safety pins.
+
+Iva Payne, the hateful thing, sent a Cubist picture of an infant falling
+downstairs, but Warble couldn't make it out so its pre-natal influence
+didn't amount to much.
+
+Daisy Snow, innocent child, sent a beautiful edition of _How to Tell
+Your Young_, a treatise of the bird-and-bee-seed-and-pollen school, and
+Faith Loveman sent her own marked copy of _Cooks that Have Helped Me_.
+
+But Warble made a face at them all, and gave their books to the
+Salvation Army and read the Diary of Maggot Somebody.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another fate slather.
+
+The baby was twins.
+
+That was the way things came to Warble--fate in big chunks--destiny in
+cloudbursts.
+
+Two little red Petticoats all at once to hang on the ancestral tree.
+
+But Warble was not caught napping. In her efficient way, she had
+provided two bassinets, two nurseries--in fact, she had really provided
+three of everything, but the third wasn't needed, and she thriftily
+ordered it put aside for the present and for the future.
+
+Dr. Petticoat was enchanted.
+
+He saw the children first, asleep in their downy nests, tucked in by
+the skilled hands of the staff of trained nurses, and as he gazed on
+his offspring, his little tucked and quilted Petticoats, he named them
+Guelph and Ghibelline, after two of his illustrious ancestors and ran
+off at once to put up their names at various select and inaccessible
+clubs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Petticoat had five hobbies. Ptomaines, his collection of pieplates,
+Warble, his personal appearance and his Aunt Dressie.
+
+The last was one of the old Cotton-Petticoats, and in her younger
+days had been a flibbertigibbet. Was still, for that matter, but she
+flibbered differently now.
+
+She appeared unannounced, took up her favorite quarters in the N.N.W.
+wing, and permeated the household.
+
+Tall. Slender. Smart. Sport suits. Bobbed hair. Smoked cigars.
+
+About fifty-five, looked forty, acted thirty.
+
+Fond of boxing and immediately on her arrival hunted up the butler to
+spar with him, being a bit off condition.
+
+“I've no use for Bill,” she would say, “with his custard pie ideals, his
+soft-bosomed rooms and his purple and fine _lingerie_.”
+
+Then she'd embrace her nephew wildly, and promise to make him her heir.
+
+She looked at Warble appraisingly.
+
+“You're a tuppenny, ha'penny chit, with eyes like two holes burnt in a
+blanket, and a nose Mr. Micawber might have waited for, but you'll do.
+You get everything you want, without effort, and that's a rare trait.
+What do you think of me?”
+
+Warble made a face at her. “Corking!” screamed Aunt Dressie, “you come
+straight from heaven and you've slid into my soul. Does Bill love you?”
+
+“Not adequately.”
+
+“H'm. You love him?”
+
+“Oh, yeth!”
+
+“All right--love and grow thin, and then he'll come round. Or get a
+case of ptomaine poisoning--that'd help. But don't take the matter too
+lightly. If you want your husband, get him, if you don't, then let him
+go.
+
+“I've just let mine go. You see we had a place--a sort of Vegetarian and
+Free Love Community proposition, but it didn't work out so we sold it.”
+
+“And your husband?”
+
+“Oh, he's on his own for a while. I'm deciding what to fly at next. I
+always ask nephew Bill's advice so as to know what not to do.”
+
+“Forgot to mention it,” said Petticoat, strolling in, “but a few people
+are coming to-night to help me plan for my new Color Organ.”
+
+“What's that?” asked Warble, gazing at Petticoat in azure-eyed
+adoration.
+
+“Oh, Lord, don't you know _anything_? Tell her, Aunt Dressie!” and
+turning on his French heel, Petticoat walked delicately out of the room.
+
+“Treat him rough, Warble, you're an awful fool,” commented the older
+woman. “Why, a Color Organ is that marvelous new invention that plays
+color instead of sound.”
+
+“Color--instead of--sound--”
+
+“Yes--now don't try to understand, for you can't possibly. Go and play
+with the children.”
+
+“I won't. Tell me more about this thing.”
+
+“I won't. You can hear it to-night, when they all talk about it.”
+
+“What use is it?”
+
+Aunt Dressie stared at her. “What use are you?” she said.
+
+Warble's brain stopped beating.
+
+Bump.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What use was she--she, the utilitarian, the efficient, the practical!
+What use? Grrrhhh!
+
+She'd show 'em! The silly bunch! Not one of them could put together the
+dissected beef picture in the cook-book if the cuts were separated!
+
+“I don't care! I won't endure it!
+
+“What's Aunt Dressie anyhow? A military blonde, with glazed chintz
+undies! What's Marigold Leathersham? A smart party who wears a hat!
+
+“What's Iva Payne? Nothing but a backbone--a shad! She's about the shape
+of a single rose vase! Damn her! Damn Lotta Munn and Daisy Snow, yes and
+May Young! They think they can charm my Bill off his perch with their
+revolting artistic propaganda, and their schools and non-schools and
+neo-schools! Rubbish!”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And when they came--came and talked wise and technical jargon about
+being endlessly enveloped in a toneless sound, about being drowned in an
+overwhelming sea of blue, pure and singing, and a moment later dropped
+into pale amethyst which in turn deepens to a threatening purple then
+plunges you into a turmoil of passionate red, always and constantly
+swirling and whirling and twisting and untwisting, gliding, approaching
+and retreating in that haunted and inexplicable color space--
+
+There was more--much more--but at this point Warble rose, made a
+comprehensive, all-embracing and very outspoken face at them and went
+down to the pantry.
+
+“It's no use--” she groaned, “perpetual waste motion--and now waste
+color! What to do--what to do!
+
+“Yet I must reform them somehow. That Iva Payne! Like a pure, pale
+lily--but I bet her soul has got its rubbers on! Lotta Munn--spinster
+in name only--with her foolish pleasures and palaces--Daisy Snow, little
+innocent-making saucer eyes at my husband--oh, Bill, dear, I love you
+so--I wish I was pale and peakéd and wise and--yes, and artistic! So
+there now!
+
+“Well, there's only two alternatives. I must reform this toy town, or be
+dragged down to their terrible depths myself!
+
+“Aunt Dressie says, love and grow thin. I surely love Bill enough, but
+if he doesn't love me--maybe I'd better try somebody else. It's done
+here.
+
+“But not Trymie Icanspoon! No, he makes me sick. I guess I'll eat
+pickles.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the pantry she found the under scullery maid screaming with an
+earache.
+
+“You poor child,” she said, sympathetically, “I'll run and get my
+husband and he'll cure it.”
+
+She flew back to the room where the eager group had their heads together
+over the blue prints and wash drawing of the new color organ. Pushing
+in between Iva and Lotta she seized Bill by the arm and said, “hurry up
+now--matter of life or death--Polly, the maid--dying--urgent case--”
+
+By that time they were down in the servant's pantry where Polly was
+moaning and groaning and wailing like a banshee.
+
+“What is it, my dear?” Big Bill asked, gently, for Polly was a very
+pretty girl. “Oh, my ear! It aches and stings and burns and smarts
+and--”
+
+“That'll do for a beginning,” Dr. Petticoat said, rolling up his sleeves
+and calling for basins of sterilized water and various antiseptics and
+disinfectants.
+
+“Can you do anything, Bill?” Warble asked anxiously, “it isn't
+ptomaines, you know.”
+
+“That's the devil of it! Why couldn't the silly thing have had a decent
+bit of ptomaine poisoning instead of this foolish earache. But,
+it's more than an earache! The bally ear has been stung--or
+something--anything bite you, Polly?”
+
+“Yes, sir, a wasp.”
+
+“She says a wathp!” exclaimed Warble. “Oh, Bill, it may mean blood
+poisoning!”
+
+“Yes, that's true--it is--the ear will have to come off. Guess I'd
+better call in old Grandberry to operate--he's an ear specialist--”
+
+“Oh, no, there won't be time! She may die!”
+
+Warble was dancing about in her excitement. “You can do it, Bill.”
+
+“All right. Get her up on the pastry table--there--that's all right.
+Now we'll take her blood pressure--here, Warb, you be taking her
+temperature, and send somebody for my stethoscope, and my case of
+instruments--and my X-ray apparatus. Now, my girl, don't cry. We'll
+fix you up.” Petticoat lighted a cigarette and sat down to take Polly's
+pulse.
+
+“That's right,” he said to the men who brought the things he had sent
+for, “scuttle back for my rubber gloves, and the chloroform outfit. Tell
+my man and his helpers to come down--I may need them--and bring me a
+clean handkerchief.”
+
+“Now for an X-ray,” he said, a little later, as he adjusted his portable
+X-razor.
+
+“Oh, it's all done,” said Warble, “While you were taking her plood
+bressure, I cut off her ear--”
+
+“What with?”
+
+“Oh, I had a boning knife and the sardine scissors. It's all right. And
+I've fixed her hair lovely--in a big curly earmuff, so it will never
+show at all. Be quiet for a day or so, Polly, and then you'll be all
+right. The only trouble is, after this, orders will probably go in one
+ear and out the other--”
+
+“You're a hummer, Warble,” Petticoat said, as they went back up stairs.
+
+“Yes, it had to be done quickly, you see. And it was out of your line,
+so I duffed in. But one thing bothered me a little. You see, the fire
+was out, and the cook lighted it with kerosene, and she used such a
+lot--something might of blew up.”
+
+“And you knew that! You knew that two Petticoats might have been blown
+up--”
+
+“Sure. Didn't you? Don't faint, pleathe!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Porgie Sproggins.
+
+Cave man. Brute.
+
+Hulking, enormous, shaggy-haired, prognathous jawed, a veritable
+Cro-magnard type. Bluely unshaven and scowling.
+
+Warble saw him first across the room at a picture exhibition in Manley
+Knight's gallery.
+
+His nose startled her. It was like an alligator pear--and his complexion
+was like those cactus fruits that likewise infest fancy grocers' shops.
+A visitor from the South Sea Islands? No, he wasn't that sort. He was a
+Fossil. Vikings were in his face, and Beef Eaters and Tarzan.
+
+Warble flew at him.
+
+“Do you like me?” she whispered.
+
+“No,” he growled, and she kissed his hand which was like a hand by
+Rodin.
+
+Thus does the law of compensation get in its fine work. Warble
+remembered the little boy at the public school, and she wished she could
+give Sproggins a red balloon.
+
+“What is he?” she asked of Trymie.
+
+“A miniature painter,” Icanspoon replied, “and a wonder! He does
+portraits that fairly make the eyes pop out of your head! He's got the
+world agog.”
+
+Warble drifted back to the attraction.
+
+“_Do_ like me,” she said, and shot him a glance that was a bolt from the
+blue.
+
+Warble was of the appealing sex, and hardly a man was yet alive who
+could resist her.
+
+Sproggins turned on her fiercely. He grasped her by the shoulders,
+pressing them back as if he would tear her apart.
+
+“Let me see your soul!” he demanded, and his great face came near to
+peer down through her eyes.
+
+“Ugh, merely blocked in,” and he flung her from him.
+
+“It isn't block tin!” she retorted, angrily, “it's pure gold--as you
+will find out!”
+
+He gave her another glance and two more grunts and turned away to devote
+himself to Daisy Snow.
+
+Bing! That was the way things came to Warble.
+
+Fate, Kismet, Predestination--whatever it was, it came zip! boom!
+hell-for-leather!
+
+“It's not only his strength but his crudeness--like petroleum or
+Egyptian art.
+
+“He can control--
+
+“Amazingly impertinent!
+
+“He wasn't--
+
+“But I wish he had been--
+
+“He will be!”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She went to see him--in his studio.
+
+A bijou studio, fitted for a painter of miniatures. French gilt
+gimcracks. Garlands of fresh pink roses, tied with blue ribbons.
+
+“Get out,” he said, staring at her a second and then returning to his
+niggling at a miniature.
+
+Warble made a face at him.
+
+“Do that again,” he commanded, reaching for a clean slice of ivory.
+
+A few tiny brushmarks.
+
+A wonder picture of Warble--made face, and all.
+
+“Pleathe--Pleathe--” she held out her hand, and he dropped the miniature
+into it.
+
+“Why don't you hit it off better with your husband?” he demanded.
+
+“Don't ask me things when you know everything yourself.”
+
+“I do. I paint a miniature of a face, and I get a soul laid bare.”
+
+“Your name? Your silly first name--”
+
+“It's a nickname.”
+
+“For what?”
+
+“Areopagitica.”
+
+“Sweet--sweet--” cooed Warble, dimpling.
+
+“Oh, you popinjay! I wish you and I were ragpickers--”
+
+“What!”
+
+“It's my ambition. I don't want to be a miniature painter all my
+life. But to be a ragpicker--ah, there's something to strive for! A
+rattlebanging cart, with jangling bells on a string across the back, a
+galled jade of a horse, broken traces, mismated lines--whoa!--giddap,
+there! oh--Warble, come with me!”
+
+He swooped her up in one gigantic arm, but she slipped through and
+running around, faced him impishly.
+
+“Would you really like me to go ridy-by in your wagon, and curl up in
+the rags and watch the stars shoot around overhead?”
+
+“No, better stay here--” he patted her shoulder gently, leaving a deep
+purple bruise.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Better not stay here--better go home.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Goodby.”
+
+He took her up--it seemed to her between his thumb and forefinger--and
+set her outside his door, promptly closing and locking it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She heard him return to his work. She trotted home. Her husband, as she
+paused to look in at his door, greeted her:
+
+“Had a good time?”
+
+She could not answer.
+
+He yawned, delicately. He was seated at his mirror, arranging his
+wringing wet permanent in serried rows by means of tiny combs.
+
+“Gooooo--oooo--oo--d night,” he said.
+
+That was all. Yet she was kinda mad.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A footle, twaddly love affair! No art. A silly little dumpling
+smattering with a brute beast.
+
+“No, he is not! He has noble impulses--ragpicking--inspired! His eyes
+were misty when he spoke of it--
+
+“A way out of Butterfly Thenter!
+
+“A ragpicker's cart--
+
+“A way out--”
+
+Petticoat held her up.
+
+“You seem a bit gone on that tin-type fellow, Sproggins.”
+
+“Yop. Maybe I'd better go to Atlantic Thity for a while.”
+
+“Oh, no, you stay here. A lady's place is in the home.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So she was fairly thrown at Porgie.
+
+Another downpour of fate. And Warble, caught without an umbrella or
+rubbers.
+
+The night came unheralded.
+
+Petticoat had gone to Iva Payne's on an urgent summons--over-ripe
+sardines--and Warble had wandered out into the moonlight.
+
+Petticoat, out of his new wealth, had, like Kubla Khan in Xanadu, a
+stately pleasure dome decreed, and in this new architectural triumph,
+where water lilies and swans floated on the surface of a deep black
+pool, Warble restlessly tossed in a welter of golden cushions, changing
+her position every ten seconds.
+
+A giant lumbered in.
+
+“Porgie!”
+
+“Saw your husband speeding away--couldn't stand it, dropped in. Take me
+upstairs--I want to see your shoe cabinet.”
+
+“Oh, don't spoil everything. Be my gentleman friend. Tell me about your
+dreams and ideals--your rags--”
+
+“Ah--rags--you do love me!”
+
+“I don't know--but I love rags--sweet--so sweet--”
+
+“You're a misfit here--as who isn't. All misfits,
+frauds--fakes--liars--”
+
+“All?” Warble looked interested.
+
+“Yes, you little simpleton. I know!” He growled angrily. “Shall I tell
+you--tell you the truth about the Butterflies?”
+
+“Pleathe--pleathe--”
+
+“I will! You ought to know--you gullible little fool. Well, to start
+with, Avery Goodman--in his true nature, he's a worldly, carnal man. His
+religion is a cloak, a raincoat, a mere disguise. Mrs. Charity Givens,
+now, she's no more truly charitable than I am! She's shrewd and stingy,
+her lavish gifts to the poor are merely made for the sake of the praise
+and eulogy heaped upon her by her admiring friends. Manley Knight,
+renowed for his bravery in the war, is an arrant coward. His soul is
+a thing of whining terror, his heroism but a mask. Oh, I know--I read
+these people truly, when they sit to me--off guard and unconsciously
+betraying themselves.
+
+“Mrs. Holm Boddy! Pah! She's far from domestic! She yearns for the halls
+of dazzling light, for gayety and even debauchery. Her devotion to home
+and children is the blackest of lies! And Iva Payne! She's no invalid!
+It's a pose to seem interesting and delicately fragile. You should see
+her stuff when no one's looking!
+
+“Judge Drinkwater is a secret drunkard. Lotta Munn is a pauper--an
+adventuress, pretending to wealth she doesn't possess. Herman True and
+his wife! Zounds, if you could hear those two quarrel! Yet they pose as
+lovers yet, and folks fall for it!”
+
+“May Young?” Warble asked, breathlessly.
+
+“An old maid. Well preserved, but no chicken. And Daisy Snow!
+Angel-faced débutante! Huh, she knows more than her mother ever dreamed
+of! You should see her in my studio, at her sittings! Cocktails,
+cigarettes, snatches of wild cabaret songs and dances--oh, Daisy Snow is
+a caution!”
+
+“The Leathershams?”
+
+“He's a profiteer--she--well, she was a cook--”
+
+“Marigold! No!”
+
+“Marigold, yes! You are a little numskull, you know. You can't see
+through these people's masks.”
+
+“Can I reform them?”
+
+“No, Baby Doll, you can't do that. They're dyed in the wool
+hypocrites--joined to their idols--let 'em alone. And as to that husband
+of yours--”
+
+“Stop! Stop! I can't stand any more! Pleathe go--pleathe--”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“What're you going to do about that Tertium Quid you've annexed?” Aunt
+Dressie inquired, casually.
+
+“I don't know,” Warble uncertained. “He has wonderful ambitions and
+aspirations. He wants to be a ragpicker--a real one.”
+
+“Ambitions are queer things,” Aunt Dressie thoughtfuled. “Now, you
+mightn't think it, but I want to be a steeple climber.”
+
+“You take Porgie off my hands, and he'll help you--”
+
+“Oh, no, child, every lassie has her laddie--and you saw him first.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Warble sighed. Thus was she always thrown at Porgie's head.
+
+Fate, like a sluicing torrent carried her ever on. Beware, beware, the
+rapids are below you!
+
+Thus Conscience, Prudence, Wisdom, Policy, Safety First--all the deadly
+virtues called her.
+
+Did she heed?
+
+As the sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a June evening, when Petticoat was called to Iva Payne's, Porgie
+came.
+
+Bowed in by a thin red line of footmen, he found Warble in the
+moon-parlor. She wore a picture frock of _point d'esprit_ and tiny pink
+rosebuds, and little pink socks and sandals.
+
+“Come out on the Carp Pond,” he muttered, picking her up and stuffing
+her in his pocket. “Nobody will see us.”
+
+He seated her in the stern of a shallop and took the golden oars. Three
+of his long sweeping strokes took them a mile up stream and they drifted
+back. Porgie talked steadily and uninterruptedly. He told her in detail
+of his ragpicking plans and how perfectly she would fit in.
+
+“Think of it!” he boomed. “No fetters of fashion, no gyves of
+convention. Free--free as air--free verse, free love, free lunch--ah,
+goroo--goroo!”
+
+“Goroo--” agreed Warble, “sweet--sweet--”
+
+“Sweet yourself!” roared Porgie, and grabbed her all up in his
+gorilla-like arms just as a ringing, musical, “Ship ahoy!” sounded on
+their ears.
+
+“Hello there, Warbie!”
+
+She knew then it was Petticoat.
+
+“Having a walk?” he inquired, casually.
+
+“Yop,” she casualed back.
+
+He pulled his skiff up alongside, threw Porgie into the deep pool and
+snatched Warble in beside himself.
+
+“Time to go home,” he said, cheerfully. “Good night, Sproggins.”
+
+He took her into the house through the conservatory, paused to pluck and
+twine a wreath of tiny pink rosebuds for her, adjusted it on her rather
+touseled curls, and took her out to the Moorish Courtyard.
+
+“Now, Warb, what about the baboon?”
+
+“I want to go ragpick with him and be pag-rickers together. Can I?
+Pleathe--”
+
+“Nixy. Now, you hark at me. I'm the real thing--a good old
+Cotton-Petticoat--birth, breeding and boodle. Your Porgie person has
+none of these--”
+
+“But he loves me!” Warble wailed.
+
+“Yes, 'cause he can't get you. Go along with him, and then see where
+you'll be! No, my Soufflée, you hear me! Can the Porgie and stick to
+your own Big Bill--your own legit.”
+
+“But you don't love me--”
+
+“Oh, I do--in my quaint married-man fashion. And--ahem--I hate to
+mention it--but--”
+
+“I know--and I _am_ banting--and exercising, and rolling downstairs and
+all that.”
+
+“Well, we're married, and divorces are not the novelty they once
+were--so let's stay put.”
+
+“Kiss me, then--”
+
+He brushed a butterfly kiss across her left eyebrow, and together they
+strolled back into the house, and as he went up to bed, Warble went down
+to the pantry to see about something.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+“I d-don't belong to Butterfly Thenter,” Warble sobbed, “I don't
+b-belong--and I-m g-going away--”
+
+“All right,” Petticoat said, cheerfully, “how long'll you be gone?”
+
+“It may be four yearth and it may be eleven--”
+
+“Oh, come, now, not all that time! It isn't done.”
+
+“You d-don't underthtand--I'm going to find my plathe in the world--I
+don't belong here.”
+
+“All right. Can I go 'long?”
+
+“No; you stay here. I'm--oh, don't you thee--I'm leaving you!”
+
+“Oh, that's it?”
+
+“You'll have the girls to amuse you--”
+
+“What girls?”
+
+“Iva and Lotta and Daisy and May Young--”
+
+“They're not girls--they're married women--”
+
+“What!”
+
+“Sure they are. They don't live with their husbands all the
+time--they're pretty modern, you know. They have separate
+establishments, but they're friendly, pally, and even a heap in love
+with each other.”
+
+“I don't believe it--”
+
+“Fact, all the same. Where you going Warble--that is, if you care to
+tell.”
+
+“I'm going where I can live a busy, useful life--not a Butterfly
+existence, with nothing to occupy my mind but art and hifalutin lingo! I
+can't express myself with long candles and Oriental junk! I'm going--oh,
+I don't know where I'm going, but I'm taking the next train out of
+Butterfly Thenter!”
+
+“Warble--haven't I treated you right? Haven't you had enough to eat? The
+Cotton-Petticoats have always been called good providers--”
+
+“It isn't that, Bill, dear--it's that--you don't love me very much--”
+
+Petticoat looked at her. His eyes traveled up and down from her golden
+curls to her golden slippers, and then crossways, from one plump
+shoulder to the other.
+
+“Goodby, Warble,” he said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That's the way things came to Warble. Freedom! All at once, in unlimited
+measure--freedom!
+
+Baffled in her attempts to reform Butterfly Center, having fallen
+down on the job of replacing Art by Utility, she went, undaunted and
+indomitable, on her way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hoboken.
+
+Work in a pickle foundry. Cucumbers, small onions, green tomatoes,
+cauliflower, tiny string beans, red peppers, mustard, vinegar,
+cauldrons, boiling, seething fumes, spicy mists, pungent odors, bottles,
+jars, labels, chow-chow, picalilli, smarting tongue, burning palate,
+inflamed oesophagus, disordered stomach, enteritis.
+
+That was the way things came to Warble. And she made good. Her position
+was that of a pickle taster.
+
+At first, only of the little gherkins, then promoted through medium
+cucumbers, to the glory of full-fledged Dills.
+
+A conscientious taster--faithful, diligent, she reached the amazing
+speed of forty pickles a minute, and all done well.
+
+Of course it told on her. Also, her heartaches told on her.
+
+Lonely. Homesick for Bill, for Ptomaine Haul, for the gallery of
+Petticoats.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet: A glorious soft summer afternoon.
+
+Warble alone in a room with a big, forceful looking man.
+
+The door is closed, and the gentle breeze scarce stirs the opaque white
+curtains.
+
+In the depths of a great arm-chair, Warble, her lovely head upturned
+sees the eager, earnest face of the man. Closer he draws and a faint
+pink flush dyes Warble's cheek. His arm is round her soft neck, his hand
+holds her dimpled chin.
+
+With a little sigh, Warble's blue eyes close, her scarlet lips part and
+though she wants to struggle she dare not, for he is a determined man,
+and a dentist will have his fill.
+
+Petticoat came to see her in Hoboken after she had been there a year.
+Unexpected and unannounced, he strode in to the pickle foundry and
+grasped the fat arm of the girl who worked next to Warble.
+
+“Come along,” he said, not unkindly, but the girl screamed.
+
+“Beg pardon,” Petticoat said, nonchalantly, “sorry. Thought you were my
+wife. Know where I can find her?”
+
+A slim, fairy-like Warble turned to greet him.
+
+Petticoat couldn't believe his eyes. That sylph, that thread, that
+wisp--his Warble--his one time plump wife!
+
+“Gee, you're great!” he cried, “I'm for you!”
+
+She got leave from the factory for a couple of years, with privilege of
+extension.
+
+“I don't want to impose on your kindness,” he said, “but I'd like
+to chase around Hoboken and take in the sights, I've never been here
+before.”
+
+“There's a Bairns' Restaurant,” said Warble, shyly, “we might go there.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They did. In a taxicab. He held her in his lap and told her the news.
+
+He had had his own rooms done over. Mediaeval setting. Romanesque
+arches. Stained-glass windows. Sculptured cloisters. Good work.
+
+“How are the twins?” she asked, timidly. “Pleathe.”
+
+“Fine. Miss you terribly--we all do. Butterfly Center mourns your loss.
+Spring a come-back, won't you, Warble?”
+
+“You want me?”
+
+“More than anything in the world! I'm mad about you! You beauty! You
+raving beauty! You'll be the talk of the world this winter. Gee, Warble,
+how I can dress you, now you're thin! Won't Beer be astounded!”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That's the way things came to Warble.
+
+The only thing she wanted, her husband's love, now flung at her feet
+in unstinted measure, pressed down and running over--love, slathers of
+it--all for her! It was sweet--a pleasant change from pickles.
+
+“How's everybody?”
+
+“Here and there. Iva's gone.”
+
+“Thank Heaven! Where'd she go?”
+
+“Dunno. Her husband took her off. Jealous of me.”
+
+“H'm. And Daisy Snow?”
+
+“Gone into the movies. She grew too heavy for society. May Young's in
+the Old Ladies' Home.”
+
+“And Lotta Munn?”
+
+“Murdered by her husband. He had to kill her--she wouldn't support
+him. The Leathershams are in the poorhouse, and Mrs. Charity Givens has
+bought their place. Want to go on a second honeymoon? Round the world?”
+
+“Yop.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They went. One night, sitting on top of the Taj Mahal, 'neath the Blue
+Moon of Persia, Warble cried,
+
+“Shall I go back to Butterfly Thenter--or shall I not?”
+
+“Spin a toddletop,” said Petticoat, taking one from his pocket.
+
+She spun it and it came up pickle foundry.
+
+So Warble said, “All right, dear, I'll go home with you whenever you're
+ready,” and she kissed him slenderly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ptomaine Haul.
+
+Two Petticoats arriving. A happy Warble sprang from the car and seemed
+fairly to skim up the steps. She passed, unnoticing, the pantry door,
+and flew up to her own rooms which had been done over to suit her new
+slenderness.
+
+“Beer,” she cried, “look at me!”
+
+“Maddum!” cried the astounded Beer. “What done it?”
+
+“Unrequited love and pickles. I can wear sport clothes now!”
+
+“Maddum can wear anything or nothing!” declared Beer triumphantly.
+
+That night, Warble, her hands behind her, wafted into Petticoat's room.
+
+He sat on the edge of his bed, running lingerie ribbons in his
+underwear.
+
+“I'll stay, always,” Warble said, sidling up to him. “And I'm happy.
+But...”
+
+“Look out! Don't let the cat get that bolt of ribbon to play with!”
+
+She smoothed his pillows and patted his sheets, while Petticoat glanced
+at her a little suspiciously, from under his gabled eyebrows.
+
+“But I don't say that Butterfly Center is worth the ground it's built
+on. I don't admit that Ptomaine Street is as useful as a Hoboken alley.
+I don't admit that Art is any good at all. I've fought like a tiger
+and I didn't make a dent on the Butterflies--but, I _have_ grown thin!”
+ “Sure, you bet you have!” said Petticoat, threading ribbon into his gold
+bodkin. “Well, kiss me good night--here you--I see you! Don't you put
+those caterpillars in my bed!”
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ptomaine Street, by Carolyn Wells
+
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