and swam in a turgid
sea of drifting clouds. The rest had been rattle and bang of jazz and
chatter, and bumping about on a hot, swaying floor into obstreperous
shoulders, and the smell of sweetened popcorn and fresh paint and
sickly perfume. Wednesday they went for a ride again and ended up at
the "Ferry" and danced and drank lemonade. And they passed a table
where sat old Mrs. LeMasters with a youngish boy with a very red,
sunburned face, and she wagged her finger at Joe and looked long and
critically at Myrtle. Thursday night he stayed home and felt
solitarily virtuous.

On Friday a picnic had been arranged. Joe "knocked off" work at four
o'clock and went home and dressed by a window through which the sun
streamed broiling hot. Before putting on his shoes he yielded to the
lure of the bed and flung himself upon it. It was all he could do to
drag himself forth and put on the finishing touches. Somehow the
notion of the picnic did not thrill him. There would be the same crowd
on hand, noisy, obstreperous, vulgar. They had no real "punch" to
them. They were like beating a tin pan: all of it was right on the
surface.

He arrived twenty minutes late and was scolded. They loaded a stack of
baskets into his car; all about his feet were cumbersome bundles; and
they scratched the polished panel in the tonneau behind the front
seat. He could hear the grating of the straw basket across the
beautiful surface and he shrank from the sound. Into the seat beside
him clambered the soft, fattish girl. Her name was Penny, he had
learned. She smirked at him as she adjusted her skirts. There was a
line of tiny beady perspiration upon her upper lip and her white
slippers gaped at the sides and were not too clean. Her pink georgette
crepe waist clung to a flabby back with a suggestion of dampness and
she simpered at him:

"I hope Myrtle won't put poison in my ice-tea."

He confessed that that would distress him exceedingly.

Into the back seat clambered the two boys with the copper throats.
Their names were Glotch and Trumpeter. They hailed Joe with acclaim,
slapped Miss Penny on the bare neck, coyly, with little flips of the
fingers, and when the slim, sour-faced girl--who was a Miss
Ardle--with her slicked black hair, climbed in between them, they fell
on her neck in ecstasies of greeting and threatened to kiss her and
were slapped roundly for their pains amid loud guffaws. It ended by
Miss Ardle coming around and sitting in the fr