"For goodness' sake!" Helen exclaimed, disgusted. "What in the world do you want with that stuff? Why, it took the rest of us here in the court days to get it all out and now you want to bring it back. Throw it away!" "Oh, no!" Patricia Pontiac objected, holding a bunch of the weeds against her heart protectingly. "It's faneweed!" "You mean you've seen the stuff before?" Patricia nodded. "We have it all over where we came from. Must have faneweed." "But you couldn't have come from some place else," Helen pointed out. "You wouldn't be green if you did." "All green where we come from," Mary Maroon said. "I don't know where that stuff--faneweed, you call it?--came from," Helen said, refusing to pay any attention to their claim that they came from some place else where everyone was green. There just wasn't any such place! "We drop seed other time we come," Patricia said. Then she added indignantly, "You no believe we come from other place?" "What other place?" asked Helen, with weary politeness. "You call it Venus." "That picture the other night," Clara Ford giggled. "Not like Venus at all. So funny!" Helen could stand no more. "So are you!" she said rudely, and went into the house. They were even crazier than she'd thought. Greener, too, when you saw them in broad daylight. Did the greenness affect the mind, and the greener you got, the zanier you became? Would she get to be like that? The idea frightened her. "No turn green?" Patricia Pontiac asked Robert plaintively one day, as if she were blaming him for her bewilderment. "No!" he answered shortly. "But I don't blame you for envying us men. It must be tough to be that lousy-looking color." "Green is _good_ color!" Mary Maroon declared stoutly. "You no have baby yourself?" "Of course not!" Patricia turned to Helen. "Then what she for?" "_He!_" Robert corrected, and then added sarcastically, "Papa works to buy baby shoes. Now, does that answer your question?" Helen sighed. There was just no use trying to explain anything to those four girls. * * * * * Fall and winter passed. The dull monotony of being green was accented now and then by articles and pictures in newspapers and magazines, and by rumors, always proved false, that a remedy had been found, though chemists, biologists and doctors continued hunting for the cause of the catastrophe. Autopsies provided no clue. Women protested that the doctors were looking at them with a wishful drop-dead expression, as if the _next_ autopsy might be the one that would supply the answer. The greenness was still confined to Mimosa Beach. Other communities kept up their quarantine. The four girls next door to the Raymonds were as zany as ever, and Dora Hastings stayed on, of necessity. And then the monotony was broken by greater calamities.