"Won't you sit down?" Helen asked. This nonsense of being scared of her menfolk had gone on long enough. She didn't want them to sit down. She wanted them to go. But she could hardly ask them to do that. Naturally, they sat down. Bobby turned on the television for a space opera, and the four new neighbors watched it avidly. When the spaceship landed on what was supposed to be Venus, they giggled behind their hands and looked at each other sidewise. Hadn't they ever seen a show like that before? What was so unusually funny about this one? When the commercial came on, Robert turned off the sound. Mary Maroon looked at Bobby, and then at Helen, who was sitting with her arm around her son. "You--baby?" she asked. Helen smiled proudly. "Yes, this is my baby." Bobby squirmed indignantly. Mary Maroon then turned to Robert. "You got baby?" Robert said, "Sure, this is my baby," patting Bobby on the knee. To Helen, he muttered, "What does she think, anyway?" The four stared at Robert and Bobby and Helen in such obvious confusion that Robert jumped up nervously to turn the sound back on. * * * * * After the girls had gone home, Bobby was sent off to bed, and Robert, loosening his tie, demanded, "What's the matter with them, anyhow? Do they have to stare at me as if I were a damned biological error? Don't they know what a man is, for heaven's sake?" "Really, Robert," Dora protested, blushing a deeper green. "Well, for gosh sakes--" "Those names!" Helen said. "Clara Ford, that's not too bad. I'm not so sure about Mary Maroon." Dora nodded. "Mary White. Mary Black. So why not Mary Maroon? But Patricia Pontiac!" Helen threw up her hands. "They must have made that one up. But _Jack Jones_!" "Crazy, if you ask me," Robert said, "pretending they were scared of me and Bobby." "There's a Patricia Beauty Shoppe next to the Pontiac agency," Dora suggested. "Maybe--" "Funny way to get a name. Where the heck are they from?" Robert wondered. "Must be from right here in town," Helen reminded him. "Otherwise they wouldn't be green." "You know, the greenness looks sort of natural on them," Dora said thoughtfully. "Well, think I'll go to bed." After she had gone, Helen said wistfully in a whisper, "If only awful things could sort of counteract each other the way some poisons do." She started making up the davenport bed; Dora had their room. "First Dora's coming, and our turning green, and now those crazy girls right next door. But three poisons--no, it wouldn't come out even." * * * * * It was a day or two later when Helen found her new neighbors working in the little flowerbed alongside their house. They were busily transplanting weeds of the kind responsible for the unpleasant odor.