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 learned later that Vernabelle called it being willowy.  She had slaty-gray eyes and a pale, dramatic face with long teeth and a dignified and powerful-looking nose.  She was kind of hungry-looking or soulful or something.  And she wore about two yards of crockery necklace that rattled when she moved.  Sounded like that Chinaman with his dishes out there in the kitchen.  I learned later that this was art jewellery.