led
"Tottykins" by all the St. Orgul's group. She was of the kind who look
at men appraisingly, and expect them to come up, be unduly familiar,
and be crushed. She had seven distinct methods of getting men to say
indiscreet things, and three variations of reply, of which the
favorite was to remark with well-bred calmness: "I'm afraid you have
made a slight error, Mr. Uh---- I didn't quite catch your name?
Perhaps they failed to tell you that I attend St. Orgul's evvvv'ry
Sunday, and have a husband and child, and am not at all, really, you
know. I hope that there has been nothing I said that has given you the
idea that I have been looking for a flirtation."

A thin, small female with bobbed hair was Tottykins, who kept her
large husband and her fat, white grub of an infant somewhere in the
back blocks. She fingered a long, gold, religious chain with her
square, stubby hand, while she gazed into men's eyes with what she
privately termed "daring frankness."

Tottykins the fair; Tottykins the modern; Tottykins who had read
_Three Weeks_ and nearly all of a wicked novel in French, and wore a
large gold cross; Tottykins who worked so hard in her little flat
that she had to rest all of every afternoon and morning; Tottykins the
advanced and liberal--yet without any of the extremes of socialists
and artists and vegetarians and other ill-conditioned persons who do
not attend St. Orgul's; Tottykins the firmly domestic, whose husband
grew more worried every year; Tottykins the intensely cultured and
inquisitive about life, the primitively free and pervasively original,
who announced in public places that she wanted always to live like the
spirit of the Dancing Bacchante statue, but had the assistant rector
of St. Orgul's in for coffee, every fourth Monday evening.

Tottykins beckoned Carl to a corner and said, with her manner of
amused condescension, "Now you sit right down here, Hawk Ericson, and
tell me _all_ about aviation."

Carl was not vastly sensitive. He had not disliked the nice young men
with eye-glasses. Not till now did he realize how Tottykins's shrill
references to the Dancing Bacchante and the Bacchanting of her
mud-colored Dutch-fashioned hair had bored him. Ennui was not, of
course, an excuse; but it was the explanation of why he answered in
this wise (very sweetly, looking Tottykins in the eyes and patting her
hand with a brother-like and altogether maddening condescension):

"No, no, that isn't the way, Do