“Just coming and buying something that I wish afterward I hadn't bought isn't the worst of it,” she owned. “That is destructive only to my spending allowance. My chief trouble is that I've gotten so I can't bear to think of spending my afternoons anywhere except at this place or one of the places like it. And if there happen to be two sales going the same day at different shops I'm perfectly miserable. All the time I'm sitting in one I'm distracted by the thought that possibly I'm missing some perfectly wonderful bargain at the other. Sometimes I suspect that my intellect is beginning to give way under the strain, and then again I'm sure I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My husband has his own diagnosis. He says I'm just plain nutty, as he vulgarly expresses it. He has taken to calling me Nutchita, which he says is Spanish for a little nut. You know since Scott came back from South America he just adores to show off the Spanish he learned. He loves to tell how he went to a bull fight down there and saw the gallant mandatory stab the charging parabola to the heart with his shining bolero or whatever you call it. “He says there is no hope of curing me and he appreciates the fact that teams of horses couldn't drag me away from these auction rooms, but he suggested that maybe we might be saved from spending our last days at the almshouse if before I started out on my mad career each afternoon I'd get somebody to muffle me and tie my arms fast so I couldn't bid on anything. But even if I couldn't speak or gesticulate I could still nod, so I suppose that wouldn't help. Besides, as I said to him, I would probably attract a good deal of attention riding down Fifth Avenue with my hands tied behind my back and a gag in my mouth. But he says he'd much rather I were made conspicuous now than that I should be even more conspicuous later on at a feeble-minded institute; he says they'd probably keep me in a strait-jacket anyhow after I reached the violent stage and that I might as well begin getting used to the feeling now. “All joking aside, though, I really did have a frightful experience last winter,” she continued. “There was a sale of desirable household effects advertised to take place up at Blank's on West Forty-fifth Street and of course I went. I've spent so much of my time at Blank's these last few months I suppose people are beginning to think I live there. Well, anyway, I was one of the first arrivals and just as I got settled the auctioneer put up a basket; a huge, fiat, curious-looking, wickerwork affair, it was. You never in all your life saw such a basket! It was too big for a soiled-clothes hamper and besides wasn't the right shape. And it was too flat to store things in and it didn't have any top on it either. I suppose you would just call it a kind of a basket.