From eleven until two was spent in eating a light lunch, and then Jacquiline Olson dropped in to complain about Mabel, Helen’s pet cobra, biting her little boy. The Olson woman was always distasteful to Helen and when she requested that the snake be kept tied up during the summer months, Helen arose majestically and with a deft uppercut knocked her over three chairs into the wood-box, where she lay moaning feebly and offered no resistance when Helen carried her over to the window and dropped her with a crash into the alley.
Most women would have considered their day wrecked after such an incident, but Helen, after draining a dipperful of hemlock wine, dismissed the affair from her mind and started to repair one of the dining room chairs she had broken in a friendly argument with Warren the evening before. After several futile attempts to make the glue stick she gave it up as a bad job and flung the chair in the bath tub where she was certain Warren would not see it for months. Then the telephone rang and a deep bass voice informed her that Baby Winifred had been arrested for throwing rocks at the statue of Benedict Arnold in front of the city hall.
“Well, there’s nothing I can do till Warren comes home,” said Helen as she hung up the receiver and went out in the back yard to dig a hole to bury the neighbor’s bull dog which Pussy Purr-mew had just dragged in the house. “I wish the dear thing wouldn’t bring home all the dogs she kills,” sighed Helen, “but I suppose she wants to show me what a good fighter she is.”
After burying the dog, Helen went back to the house and picking up the latest issue of Naughty Stories, soon was so interested that she did not hear the voices of the men at the front door when they brought Warren home from the office, drunk, and dumped him on the front porch, where he lay until she stumbled over him an hour later.
By this time Warren was sober enough to eat supper, which he did in a silence only broken when he inhaled the soup and drank his coffee.
“Why don’t you talk to me?” Helen demanded toward the end of the meal. “Don’t sit there like a dummy and never say a word. Men are such brutes!” And throwing herself behind the kitchen stove she wept bitterly.
* * *
Too Fast!
The Victor Dog sat on a talking machine and the record ran so fast, that the dog’s head caught up with his tail, and he didn’t have room to pass “His Master’s Voice.”
* * *