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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.
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."
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.
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.
She turned to go back, with a quickness which, I avow, was beautifully and tenderly different from irritation, yet which caused her petticoat's frail embroidery to catch on one of his spurs and cling till the whole laughing bevy had gathered round to jest over Flora's disentanglement of it. "But really, Nan, you know," said Constance that evening in their home, "you used to believe that yourself!
"It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand pounds, or two or three times as much, for all I know. No trouble, no " "The petticoat's the trouble," Ricardo struck in. He had resumed his noiseless, feline, oblique prowling, in which an observer would have detected a new character of excitement, such as a wild animal of the cat species, anxious to make a spring, might betray.
"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!"
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 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.
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.
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