k and got into all the new movements and among people who was
doing things, and was now very, very advanced being what you might call
an intellectual; but I would be sure to like her because she was so
delightfully Bohemian, not standing on ceremony but darting straight
to the heart of life, which is so complex to most of us who live within
convention's shell and never get in touch with the great throbbing centre
of things. She didn't say what things. It was a new line of chatter from
Metta. Usually she'd have been telling me her troubles with Chinese help,
or what a robber the Square Deal meat market was, or, at the most, how
her fruit-and-fish piece had carried off the first prize of twenty
dollars at the Kulanche County Fair.

So I say I'll be sure to look in on her and her new friend. I reckoned
she must be the Miss Smith and the glass blower I'd already heard about
that morning. Of course "Miss Smith" didn't sound like much, but
Vernabelle Smith was different. That name Vernabelle made all the
difference in the world. You sort of forgot the ensuing Smith.

That same afternoon about four P.M. I dropped round to the Bigler house.
Metta's mother let me in. She's a neat and precise old lady with careful
hair, but she looked scared as she let me in and led me to the door of
Metta's studio, which is a big room at the back of the house. She didn't
go in herself. She pulled it open and shut it on me quick, like it was a
lion's den or something.

All the curtains was down, candles lighted, and the room not only hot but
full of cigarette smoke and smoke from about forty of these here punk
sticks that smoldered away on different perches. It had the smell of a
nice hot Chinese laundry on a busy winter's night. About eight or ten
people was huddled round the couch, parties I could hardly make out
through this gas attack, and everyone was gabbling. Metta come forward
to see who it was, then she pulled something up out of the group and said
"Meet dear Vernabelle."

Well, she was about Metta's age, a short thirty, a kind of a slaty blonde
with bobbed hair--she'd been reached fore and aft--and dressed mostly in
a pale-blue smock and no stockings. Nothing but sandals. I could hardly
get my eyes off her feet at first. Very few of our justly famous sex can
afford to brave the public gaze without their stockings on. Vernabelle
could ill afford it. She was skinny, if you know what I mean, lots of
tendons and so forth, though I learne