They were even crazier than she'd thought. Greener, too, when you saw them in broad daylight. Did the greenness affect the mind, and the greener you got, the zanier you became? Would she get to be like that? The idea frightened her.
"No turn green?" Patricia Pontiac asked Robert plaintively one day, as if she were blaming him for her bewilderment.
"No!" he answered shortly. "But I don't blame you for envying us men. It must be tough to be that lousy-looking color."
"Green is good color!" Mary Maroon declared stoutly. "You no have baby yourself?"
"Of course not!"
Patricia turned to Helen. "Then what she for?"
"He!" Robert corrected, and then added sarcastically, "Papa works to buy baby shoes. Now, does that answer your question?"
Helen sighed. There was just no use trying to explain anything to those four girls.
Fall and winter passed. The dull monotony of being green was accented now and then by articles and pictures in newspapers and magazines, and by rumors, always proved false, that a remedy had been found, though chemists, biologists and doctors continued hunting for the cause of the catastrophe. Autopsies provided no clue. Women protested that the doctors were looking at them with a wishful drop-dead expression, as if the next autopsy might be the one that would supply the answer.