Vernabelle greeted me with many contortions like she was taking an exercise and said she had heard so much about me and how interesting it was to meet one who did things.  I said I was merely in the cattle business.  She said “How perfect!” and clasped her hands in ecstasy over the very idea.  She said I was by way of being the ideal type for it.  And did I employ real cowboys; and they, too, must be fascinating, because they did things.  I said they did if watched; otherwise not.  And did I acquire an ascendancy over their rough natures.  I said we quickly parted forever if I didn’t do that.  Then she clanked across to the couch, where she set down on her feet.  I give her credit for that much judgment.  That girl never did just plain set down.  It was either on one foot or on both feet, or she draped herself along the furniture to show how willowy she could be without its hurting.

She now lighted a new cigarette from her old one and went on telling the fish-faces about her how little colour she had found here.  She said we was by way of being a mere flat expanse in dull tints.  But what could be expected of a crude commercialism where the arts was by way of being starved.  Ah, it was so different from dear old Washington Square, where one was by way of being at the heart of life.  It took me some time to get this by-way-of-being stuff, but the others was eating it up.  Metta Bigler hovered round proud as Lucifer and trying to smoke for the first time in her life, though making poor work of it, like she was eating the cigarette and every now and then finding bits she couldn’t swallow, and holding it off at arm’s length in between bites.  Mrs. Henrietta Templeton Price was making better work of the cigarettes, and Beryl Mae Macomber, a wealthy young society heiress and debutante, aged seventeen, was saying that she had always felt this lack in Red Gap and would of been in the movies long since if her aunt had listened to reason.  The only man present was Edgar Tomlinson, who is Red Gap’s most prominent first-nighter and does the Lounger-in-the-Lobby column for the Recorder, reviewing all the new films in an able and fearless manner.  Edgar was looking like he had come into his own at last.  He was wearing a flowing tie and a collar that hardly come higher than his chest and big wind shields on a black cord, and had his hair mussed up like a regular Bohemian in a Sunday paper.  Vernabelle was soon telling him how refreshing it was to meet away out here one who was by way of doing things, and she had read that very morning his review of the film entitled A Sister of Sin, and had found it masterly in its clear-cut analysis, but why did he waste himself here when the great world lay open.  Edgar thrust back his falling hair with a weary hand and tried to look modest, but it was useless.  Vernabelle devoted most of her chat to Edgar.  She was an incessant person but it seemed to take a man to bring out all that was best in her.