“Look here, Warble, you want to get over your fool idea that because a woman is slender she isn't adorable. These folks are up to date, snuff and mischief.”

“I know, that's what's biting me. Life seems so hard for them.”

“Oh, they don't mind it. Now you must meet the bunch. They're all down here to meet their husbands or something just as good. Now you behave yourself.”

“Yop.”

She had a grip on herself. She was ready to kiss and be friends with them all. But she was scared at the rackety pack who ballyhooed like Coney Island and surged down upon her like a Niagara Falls.

She had the impression that all the men had soft voices, large, embracing arms, gimlet eyes and bored, impersonal smiles. She knew they were taking her in. Their pleasant hoots and yells of greeting overcame her.

“Oh, pleathe—pleathe,” she lisped.

In her fresh frilled dimity and soft sash of baby-blue Surah, her rolled white socks disclosing but a few tantalizing inches of seashell-pink calf, Warble stood, eyes cast down, a pretty, foolish thing,

As soft as young,
As gay as soft,

and, to a man, the male population of Butterfly Center fell for her.