“How about the western cowboy and his fancy boots?” Frank shot back over his book.
“Oh, that’s different,” Ralph said. “Honey’s right. That business of taking care of their feet symbolizes the whole sex to me. They do the things they do just because the others do them—like sheep jumping over a wall. Their fad at present is pedicure. Peachy’s at it just like the rest of them. Every night when I come home, I find her sitting down with both feet done up in one of those beautiful scarfs she’s collected, resting on a cushion. It’s rather amusing, though.” Ralph struggled to suppress his smile of appreciation.
“Clara’s the same.” Pete smiled too. “She’s cut herself out some high sandals from a pair of my old boots. And she wears them day and night. She says she’s been careless lately about getting her feet sunburned. And she’s not going to let me see them until they’re perfectly white and transparent again. She says that small, beautiful, and useless feet were one of the points of beauty with her people.”
“Julia’s got the bug, too.” Billy’s eyes lighted with a gleam of tenderness. “Among the things she found in the trunk was a box of white silk stockings and some moccasins. She’s taken to wearing them lately. It always puts a crimp in me to get a glimpse of them—as if she’d suddenly become a normal, civilized woman.”
“Now that I think of it,” Frank again came out of his book. “Chiquita asked me a little while ago for a pair of shoes. She’s wearing them all the time now to protect her feet—from the sun she says.”
“It is the most curious thing,” Billy said, “that they have never wanted to walk. Not that I want them to now,” he added hastily. “That’s their greatest charm in my eyes—their helplessness. It has a curious appeal. But it is singular that they never even tried it, if only out of curiosity.”
“They have great contempt for walking,” Honey observed. “And it has never occurred to them, apparently, that they could enjoy themselves so much more if they could only get about freely. Not that I want them to—any more than you. That utter helplessness is, as you say, appealing.”
“Oh, well,” Ralph said contemptuously, “what can you expect of them? I tell you it’s lack of gray matter. They don’t cerebrate. They don’t co-ordinate. They don’t correlate. They have no initiative, no creative faculty, no mental curiosity or reflexes or reactions. They’re nothing but an unrelated bunch of instincts, intuitions, and impulses—human nonsense machines! Why if the positions were reversed and we’d lost our wings, we’d have been trying to walk the first day. We’d have been walking better than they by the end of a month.”
“I like it just as it is,” Pete said contentedly. “They can’t fly and they don’t want to walk. We always know where to find them.”
“Thank God we don’t have to consider that matter,” Billy concluded. “Apparently the walking impulse isn’t in them. They might some time, by hook or crook, wheedle us into letting them fly a little. But one thing is certain, they’ll never take a step on those useless feet.”