just love to beat a crippled
step-child to death, and she--well, her work wasn't so coarse; she kept
her mad down better. She set there as nice and sweet as a pet scorpion.

"'A scrap,' I says to myself, 'and they've only half finished. She's
threatened to quit and he, the cowardly dog, has dared her to.' Plain
enough. The waiter knew it soon as I did when he come to take their
order. Wouldn't speak to each other. Talked through him; fought it out
to something different for each one. Couldn't even agree on the same
kind of cocktail. Both slamming the waiter--before they fought the order
to a finish each had wanted to call the head waiter, only the other one
stopped it.

"So I rubbered awhile, trying to figure out why such folks want to
finish up their fights in a restaurant, and then I forgot 'em, looking
at some other persons that come in. Then the orchestra started this song
and I seen a lady was getting up in front to sing it. I admit the piece
got me. It got me good. Really, ain't it the gooey mess of heart-throbs
when you come right down to it? This lady singer was a good-looking
sad-faced contralto in a low-cut black dress--and how she did get the
tears out of them low notes! Oh, I quit looking at people while her
chest was oozing out that music. And it got others, too. I noticed lots
of 'em had stopped eating when I looked round, and there was so much
clapping she had to get up and do it all over again. And what you think?
In the middle of the second time I look over to these fighters, and
darned if they ain't holding hands across the table; and more, she's got
a kind of pitiful, crying smile on and he's crying right out--crying
into his cold asparagus, plain as day.

"What more would you want to know about the powers of this here piece of
music? They both spoke like human beings to the scared waiter when he
come back, and the lad left a five-spot on the tray when he paid his
check. Some song, yes?

"And all this flashed back on me when Nettie and I stood there watching
this cute little banjo. So I says to myself, 'Here, my morbid vestal,
is where I put you sane; here's where I hurl an asphyxiating bomb into
the trenches of the New Dawn.' Out loud I only says, 'Let's go in and
see if Wilbur has got some new records.'

"'Wilbur?' says she, and we went in. Nettie had not met Wilbur.

"I may as well tell you here and now that C. Wilbur Todd is a shrimp.
Shrimp I have said and shrimp I always will say. He talk