“Pleased to eat you,” he responded, looking at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. Small wonder, for Warble was so peachy and creamy, so sweet and delectable that she was a far more appetizing sight than most viands are. She smiled again--engagingly this time, too. Thus in the Painted Vale of Huneker, Vamp and Victim beguiled the hours. Thus, and not in treacled cadences, intrigued Mariar and Sir Thomas in the back alley. “Do you like it here?” asked the doctor. “Yop. But sometimes I feel wasted--” “You don't look wasted--” “No--” after a hasty glance in the wall mirror. “Don't you get sick of the sight of food?” “Here, oh, no! I don't know any lovelier sight than our kitchens--yes, yes, sir, I'll get your pied frotatoes at oneth.” When Warble was a bit frustrated or embarrassed, she often inverted her initials and lisped. It was one of her ways. The other clients at her table had no intention of being neglected while their Pickfordian waitress smiled engagingly on a newcomer. It was the iceman who had hollered. He seemed to be merely a red-faced inanimate object, that worked by strange and compound levers. Next him was a hat-check girl, a queenly person who communed with something set in the lid of her vanity case, and fed on chicken à la king. Then there was a newsboy, whose all-observant eyes darted about everywhere, the while he absorbed baked beans and ketchup. An old maid shopper. She merely brooded over her worn and pencil-scored memorandum, and muttered of fringe and buttons as she spilled tea on her samples of Navy blue foulard. A blind man. Of no interest save that he had a calm and gentle demeanor and was the only one who didn't spill things. His face wore a grieved but resigned look, as if something had died in his scrambled eggs. The iceman, who had the hard, set jaw of a prize fighter was successfully eating steak, and he welcomed the incoming fried potatoes, as one greets a new instalment of a serial. It was a fat and pink and lovely Warble who at last trotted back with Petticoat's order. The great specialist had an unbridled passion for pie, and throwing restraint to the winds he had ordered three kinds. The wedges Warble brought were the very widest she could wheedle from the head pie-cutter--and Warble was some wheedler, especially when she coaxed prettily for a big pieth of cuthtard. Petticoat looked at her again as she came, pie-laden. Her cap was a bit askew, but her eyes weren't. In her white linen dress and apron and white cap, her little pink face looked to Petticoat's appraising glance like a postage stamp on an expanse of white linen envelope. Little did he think, as he took his custard pie that he was about to put his foot in it. Yet he did. “May I see you again sometime?” he said, ignoring the hat-check girl's ogling and the iceman's cold stare. Warble made a face at him. It was one of her ways. “What's your address?” he asked. “You can ask the Boss--if you really want to know.”