r of half-submerged
chicken Ma Pettengill casually remarked that carefree Bohemians was
always the first to suffer under prohibition, and that you couldn't have
a really good Latin Quarter in a dry town. I let it go. I must always
permit her certain speeches of seeming irrelevance before she will
consent to tell me all. Thus a moment later as she lavished valuable
butter fat upon one of the spirituelle muffins she communicated the
further item that Cousin Egbert Floud still believed Bohemians was glass
blowers, he having seen a troupe of such at the World's Fair. He had, it
is true, known some section hands down on the narrow gauge that was also
Bohemians, but Bohemians of any class at all was glass blowers, and that
was an end of it. No use telling him different, once he gets an idea into
his poor old head.

This, too, I let pass, overcome for the moment by the infatuating
qualities of the chicken stew. But when appetites, needlessly inflamed by
the lawless tippling, had at last been appeased and the lady had built
her first cigarette I betrayed a willingness to hear more of the hinted
connection between winter sports and Latin Quarters peopled by Bohemians,
glass-blowing or otherwise. The woman chuckled privately through the
first cigarette, adeptly fashioned another, removed to a rocking-chair
before the open fire and in a businesslike fervour seized a half-knitted
woollen sock, upon which she fell to work.

She now remarked that there must be along the Front millions of sweaters
and wristlets and mufflers and dewdads that it looked well to knit in
public, so it seemed to be up to her to supply a few pairs of socks. She
said you naturally couldn't expect these here society dames that knitted
in theatres and hotel corridors to be knitting anything so ugly as socks,
even if they would know how to handle four needles, which they mostly
wouldn't; but someone had to do it. Without the slightest change of key
she added that it was a long story and painful in spots, but had a happy
ending, and she didn't know as she minded telling me.

So I come down to Red Gap about December first hoping to hole up for
the winter and get thoroughly warmed through before spring. Little did
I know our growing metropolis was to be torn by dissension until you
didn't know who was speaking to who. And all because of a lady Bohemian
from Washington Square, New York City, who had crept into our midst
and started a Latin Quarter overnight. The f