When we followed her later, there were already a few people there, talking in corners, and more were arriving. Now and again, Edith glanced up from her letters to greet one of the newcomers but she did not rise. Peter wandered about the room, looking at the pictures, occasionally picking up a book, of which there were a great number lying about on the tables. Donald Evans, correct and rather portentous in his studied dignity, made an early appearance. At this period he was involved in the composition of the Sonnets from the Patagonian. He drew a manuscript from his pocket and laid it on the desk before Edith. Over her shoulder I read the line,
She triumphed in the tragic turnip field.
Hutchins Hapgood, haggard and restless and yet strangely sympathetic, came in and joined uneasily in an eager conversation with a young woman with bobbed hair who stood in a corner, fingering an African primitive carving in wood of a naked woman with long pointed breasts. Yorska was there, the exotic Yorska with her long nose, her tragic eyes, her mouth like a crimson slit in a face as white as Pierrot's, a modern Judith looking for a modern Holofernes and never finding him; Jo Davidson with his jovial black beard, Bacchus or satyr in evening clothes; Edna Kenton, in a pale green floating tunic of her own design; Max Eastman, poet and Socialist, and his wife, Ida Rauh; Helen Westley, a tall angular scrag with something of the aristocracy of the Remsen-Meseroles informing her spine, who had acquired a considerable reputation for being "paintable" by never paying the slightest attention to her clothes; Henrietta Rodman, the round-faced, cherubic Max Weber.... I caught all these and, quite suddenly, although for some time, I remembered afterward, I had been aware of the odour of Cœur de Jeannette, Clara Barnes. She was sitting, when I discovered her, on a sofa before the fire-place, in which the coals were glowing. She was more matronly in figure and was dressed with some attempt at stylization. She was wearing a robe of batik, iridescent in the shades of the black opal, with a belt of moonstones set in copper, and huge ear-rings fashioned of human hair. On her feet were copper-coloured sandals and I was pleased to note that her dress was long enough to cover her ankles. I leaned over the back of the sofa and addressed her,
Miss Barnes, I believe....
She turned.
Oh, it's you. What a long time it's been since Paris.
I perceived that her new manner was not exclusively a matter of clothes.
Peter is here tonight, I hazarded.
Is he? she parried, without any apparent interest.
What are you doing now?