HEN Herman Pupick, the celebrated censor and reformer came to life the next morning, he was dressed in a pair of silk lavender pajamas. Even so, he looked like a cross between a chop suey pedlar and the inside of an Odd Fellow’s coffin.
“Good morning,” said Cutie, as our hero opened his one good eye to this unaccustomed sight at the foot of his haystack. For Cutie, risen from the morning tub, crowded her two hundred dollar kimona like a freshly inflated brand new inner tube.
“My Gawd,” continued our heroine, after a long look at the piece of rat bait occupying the company couch, “I forgot all about you being out here. I must have got my dates mixed. You are Mr. Pupick, the celebrated censor and reformer, if I remember right.”
“Yes,” moaned Herman, “but I must have met with an accident.”
“All right,” said Cutie, “you can use the bathroom.”
Ten minutes later, our hero came bounding out and stood jumping up and down in the middle of the room.
“I have received a message,” he gurgled, “from on High. It is a plan to rid the country of all lewd and obscene literature overnight.”
Throwing himself on the floor in front of Cutie, our hero sunk his false teeth into her ankle and barked for more.
“You are my inspiration,” Herman cried. “Until you came into my life, I was only an ordinary censor and reformer. Now I feel new vigor in my veins. I feel strong enough to stamp out the entire sins of our age.”
Cutie reached for a crowbar which was standing on the mantlepiece and as she did so her kimona carried the ball for ten yards around the left end. Herman couldn’t restrain himself and raised his voice in song.
“When Jesus shows his shining face there is sunshine in my soul,” our hero chanted.
“Stand up, poison ivy,” Cutie interrupted, kicking him under the chin, “and if you try to bite me once more I will play taps on your skull with this crowbar. I won’t stand for your making love to me unless you use a pair of iceman’s tongs and a mask. You are a very rough man, Herman, besides which you have a face which in its happiest moments reminds me of a cow pasture, it being so full of places I can’t look.”
“Oh, my dear young woman,” our hero moaned, “you have failed to understand me. You are my inspiration for higher things. You do not know how lewd and wicked is the world. How dangerous it is for little children to grow up surrounded by lewd and obscene literature.”
Herman’s potato head fell despairingly on Cutie’s knee.
“Debauchery is everywhere,” our hero groaned. “I cannot sleep nights thinking of all the evil there is and of the things I have left undone.”
Cutie felt a pang of conscience. Emboldened by her silence, Herman’s noble heart grew warm. He reached one of his fins for her ribs and declaimed passionately:
“Think, think, my dear fellow worker. Everywhere you turn, what do you see? Books which corrupt the morals of the young. Plays which stir young men and women to depravities. We will put an end to it. Don’t you understand? God has sent you to me. I have plucked you from the fire.”
Our little burning brand felt a great white light open in her soul.
“Ouch,” she murmured, “don’t pinch me so hard. I understand. I have led a sinful life, reading books unfit for children.”
“Yes, yes,” panted our hero, “your wickedness is plain to you now. Repent! Repent!”
“No,” Cutie murmured.
Herman threw his arms around her, his face shining with piety like a Christmas tree. Burying his nose in her collarbone, he began to squeal like a peanut wagon.
“We will burn down all the bookstores,” he cried, “and blow up all the publishing houses and public libraries and arrest everybody. Everybody,” he repeated. “Repent, sister, repent! Think of the little kiddies whose lives we will purify.”
Cutie burst into tears.
“Let me go,” she sobbed. “I am unfit for the great work.”
Herman lifted her to her feet. A moment later, Len Small was elected governor by a large majority of one hundred thousand votes. Although this gesture on the part of the proletariat argued that a Republican landslide had started, the commander in chief of the navy, a bald headed man with a wen on his right thumb, refused permission to the transcontinental aviators to stop over in Madrid. The results of this action are too well known for further comment. Herman Pupick was defeated for congress on the fifth ballot and the commonwealth of Illinois had lost another able defender.