Cousin Egbert wasn't so glib as Lon. He looked nervous. He'd come expecting a little glass blowing and here was something strange. He didn't seem to be able to tell her all about himself. He couldn't start good.
"Tell me what you are reading, then," says Vernabelle; and Cousin Egbert kind of strangled at this, too. He finally manages to say that he tried to read Shakespere once but it was too fine print. The old liar! He wouldn't read a line of Shakespere in letters a foot high. It just showed that he, too, was trying to bluff along with the rest of 'em on this Bohemian chatter.
Vernabelle continued full of blandishment for the two men and poured 'em out stiff hookers of this demon elderberry wine and lighted cigarettes for 'em from hers. I don't know whether this beverage got to Lon Price or not, but in a minute he was telling her that beauty in her sex was a common-enough heritage, but how all-too rare it was to find beauty and brains in the same woman! Vernabelle called him comrade after that, and then she was telling Cousin Egbert that he was of the great outdoors—a man's man! Egbert looked kind of silly and puzzled at this. He didn't seem to be so darned sure about it.
Then Vernabelle worked over by the easel—it took her about six attitudes leaning against things, to get there—and showed her oil paintings to the newcomers. Lon Price was full of talk and admiration and said she must do a poster for him showing a creature of rare beauty up in the clouds beckoning home-buyers out to Price's Addition, where it was Big Lots, Little Payments, and all Nature seemed to smile. He said this figure, however, had better have something in the shape of a garment on it because the poster would go into homes where art in its broader extent was still regarded in a suspicious or even hostile manner, if she caught what he meant. The artist says she can readily understand, and that life after all is anything but selective.
Cousin Egbert just looked at the pictures in an uncomfortable manner.
He spoke only once and that was about the mottled lady reaching over
her shoulder and smiling. "Grinitch," says he with a knowing leer. But
Vernabelle only says, yes, it was painted in the dear old village.
Then the crowd sort of got together on the couch and in chairs and Vernabelle talked for one and all. She said how stimulating it was for a few of the real people who did things to come together in this way after the day's turmoil—to get away from it all! Beryl Mae said she had often wanted to get away from it all, but her aunt was narrow-minded. Henrietta Price lighted her ninth cigarette and said how it reminded her of the Latin Quarter of Paris, which she had never been to, but her cousin had spent a whole afternoon there once and had been simply wild about it. Vernabelle said it was times like this, with a few real people, that she got her biggest ideas; that life in the rough was too terribly a labyrinth, didn't we think, stunning one with its immensity, while in these dear little half-lighted moments the real came out unafraid, if we understood what she meant. Many of us said we did.
It was when we got up to go that Vernabelle told me things about Cousin
Egbert. She said he must have great reserve strength in his personality.
She said he fairly frightened her, he was so superbly elemental.
"It is not so much Mr. Floud that frightens me," says she, "as the inevitability of him—just beautifully that! And such sang fraw!"
Poor Egbert was where he had to overhear this, and I had never seen him less sang fraw—if that's the word. He looked more like a case of nettle rash, especially when Vernabelle gripped his hand at parting and called him comrade!
We finally groped our way through the smoke of the door and said what a lovely time we'd had, and Metta said we must make a practice of dropping in at this hour. Vernabelle called us all comrade and said the time had been by way of being a series of precious moments to her, even if these little studio affairs did always leave poor her like a limp lily. Yep; that's the term she used and she was draped down a bookcase when she said it, trying to look as near as possible like a limp lily.