I understood it. Another one was called "The Striving
Soul," to which the prof played something livelier. Vernabelle went round
and round, lifting her feet high. It looked to me like she was climbing
a spiral staircase that wasn't there. Then she was a hunted fawn in a
dark forest and was finally shot through the heart by a cruel hunter--who
was probably nearsighted. And in the last one she was a Russian peasant
that has got stewed on vodka at the Russian county fair. This was the
best one. You couldn't see her so well when she moved quick.

Of course there was hearty applause when it was all over, and pretty soon
Vernabelle come out again in her kimono. Panting like a tuckered hound
she was when the comrades gathered to tell her how wonderful she had
been.

"That music tears me," says Vernabelle, putting her hands to her chest
to show where it tore. "That last maddening Russian bit--it leaves me
like a limp lily!" So she was led to the punch bowl by Comrades Price
and Tuttle, with the others pushing after and lighting cigarettes for
her.

It was agreed that the evening had been a triumph for Vernabelle's art.
Almost every Bohemian present, it seemed, had either been tore or
maddened by that last Russian bit.

Vernabelle was soon saying that if she had one message for us it was the
sacred message of beauty. Jeff Tuttle says, "You've certainly delivered
it, little woman!" Vernabelle says, oh, perhaps, in her poor, weak
way--she was being a limp lily against the piano then--but art is a
terrible master to serve, demanding one's all. Comrade Price says what
more could she give than she has to-night. And then, first thing I
know, they're all talking about an intimate theatre.

This was another part of Vernabelle's message. It seems intimate theatres
is all the rage in New York, and the Bigler barn is just the place to
have one in. Vernabelle says they will use the big part where the hay
used to be and paint their own scenery and act their own plays and thus
find a splendid means of self-expression the way people of the real sort
are doing in large cities.

Everyone is wild about this in a minute, and says how quaint and jolly
Bohemian it will be. The Bigler barn is just the place, with no horse
there since Metta bought one of the best-selling cars that ever came out
of Michigan, and Vernabelle says she has written a couple of stunning
little one-act pieces, too powerful for the big theatres because they go
right to t