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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.