Carson Haggerty, the American poet, was there. But the center of them all was Olympia Johns herself—spinster, thirty-four, as small and active and excitedly energetic as an ant trying to get around a match. She had much of the ant’s brownness and slimness, too. Her pale hair was always falling from under her fillet of worn black velvet (with the dingy under side of the velvet showing curled up at the edges). A lock would tangle in front of her eyes, and she would impatiently shove it back with a jab of her thin rough hands, never stopping in her machine-gun volley of words.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she would pour out. “Don’t you see? We must do something. I tell you the conditions are intolerable, simply intolerable. We must do something.”
The conditions were, it seemed, intolerable in the several branches of education of female infants, water rates in Bloomsbury, the cutlery industry, and ballad-singing.
And mostly she was right. Only her rightness was so demanding, so restless, that it left Mr. Wrenn gasping.
Olympia depended on Carson Haggerty for most of the “Yes, that’s so’s,” though he seemed to be trying to steal glances at another woman, a young woman, a lazy smiling pretty girl of twenty, who, Istra told Mr. Wrenn, studied Greek archaeology at the Museum. No one knew why she studied it. She seemed peacefully ignorant of everything but her kissable lips, and she adorably poked at things with lazy graceful fingers, and talked the Little Language to Carson Haggerty, at which Olympia shrugged her shoulders and turned to the others.
There were a Mr. and Mrs. Stettinius—she a poet; he a bleached man, with goatish whiskers and a sanctimonious white neck-cloth, who was Puritanically, ethically, gloomily, religiously atheistic. Items in the room were a young man who taught in Mr. Jeney’s Select School and an Established Church mission worker from Whitechapel, who loved to be shocked.
It was Mr. Wrenn who was really shocked, however, not by the noise and odor; not by the smoking of the women; not by the demand that “we” tear down the state; no, not by these was Our Mr. Wrenn of the Souvenir Company shocked, but by his own fascinated interest in the frank talk of sex. He had always had a quite undefined supposition that it was wicked to talk of sex unless one made a joke of it.
Then came the superradicals, to confuse the radicals who confused Mr. Wrenn.
For always there is a greater rebellion; and though you sell your prayer-book to buy Bakunine, and esteem yourself revolutionary to a point of madness, you shall find one who calls you reactionary. The scorners came in together—Moe Tchatzsky, the syndicalist and direct actionist, and Jane Schott, the writer of impressionistic prose—and they sat silently sneering on a couch.
Istra rose, nodded at Mr. Wrenn, and departed, despite Olympia’s hospitable shrieks after them of “Oh stay! It’s only a little after ten. Do stay and have something to eat.”