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.