“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.”