Ptomaine Street | Page 4

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."
"Want to know! Say, you waitress!"
Of the love-making of Warble and Big Bill Petticoat there is nothing to
be reported which may not be read in any Satevepost serial, which may
not be heard at any summer resort, in any winter garden. They were
zoology and history. Their speech was free silver and their silence was
golden.
It was a non-stop courtship. All the plump beauty of youth and all the
assured complacence of a well-to-do married man kept them up in the
air.
Petticoat wasn't a married man, but he had their technique.
They took a walk, and followed a roundabout way. Then they sat on a
bank, and his arm followed a roundabout way.
She seemed more young and tender than ever, in a simple white muslin
frock and blue sash. Her broad-leafed hat was decked with a few pink
roses, and roll-top white socks added a good deal to the picture.
Petticoat was charmed.
"Golly, but I love you, Warble!" he cried.
She did not answer, but she touched the upper edge of the wallet in his
breast pocket with an exploring gesture.
"You think I'm too darn aesthetic! Well, you're not, and so we ought to
mate. We're complementary to one another, like air and sunshine or
light and shade."
"Or pork and beans, or pie and cheese."
"Yes, or like stout and porter--I'll be the porter, oh--what's the use of
talking? Let my lips talk to you!"

He kissed her cheek, imprinting thereon a Cupid's bow, by reason of his
own addiction to the lipstick.
Warble rubbed it off with the back of her hand, and said, "Oh,
pleathe--pleathe."
She wondered if she ought to have said thank you, but it was only a
drifting thought and she turned the other cheek. Then she smiled her
engaging smile and they were engaged.
Later in the game, she said, with pretty diffidence, "I would like to thee
Butterfly Thenter." And she blushed like the inside of those pink meat
melons.
"I knew it!" and Petticoat produced a pile of Sunday Picture
Supplements.
Her cheek nested in his permanent wave, Warble studied the pictures.
They were the last word in artistic architecture. Truly, Butterfly Center,
where Petticoat lived, was a veritable Utopia, Arcadia, Spotless Town
and Happy Valley all rolled into one. Broad streets, arching trees,
sublimated houses, glorified shops--it seemed to Warble like a
flitter-work Christmas card from the drug-store.
"How'd you like to scoot up there with me in a fast aeroplane?" he
jollied her.
"It might be--a lark--" she dubioused.
"But here's the picture!" and proudly he exhibited a full length view of
his own home.
"Ptomaine Haul," he exploited, proudly. "Built every inch of it from the
busy little ptomaines. Coral insects nothing on that, eh? And here's the
sort of people I practice on. Old Leathersham, now--he has a corking
château--French Renaissance. And Mrs. Charity Givens--she has a
Georgian shack. And, oh, yes, here's Iva Payne. She's one of my most

profitable patients--sick all the time."
Warble studied the pictures.
"What expensive people," she