Pretty soon Metta went over to a table and brought back some glasses of wine on a tray, of which all partook with more or less relish.  I recognized it from the bottle.  It was elderberry wine that Metta’s mother had put up.  You have to be resourceful in a dry state.

“I’m afraid you’ll all think me frightfully Bohemian,” said Metta proudly.

Beryl Mae held her glass up to the light and said, “After all, does anything in life really matter?” She appeared very blase in all her desperate young beauty.  She and Edgar Tomlinson looked as near right as anything you’d see in Washington Square.  Vernabelle said the true spirit of Bohemia knew neither time nor place; it was wherever those gathered who were doing things, and wasn’t it splendid that even here in this crude Western town a few of the real sort could meet and make their own little quarter and talk about the big things, the lasting things!  Everyone said yes, quite so; and they all tried to handle their wine like it was a rare old vintage.  But you can’t hold much wassail on the juice of the elderberry; it ain’t the most jocund stuff the world as fermented by Metta’s mother.

However, it livened things up a bit and Vernabelle set down her glass and chattered some more.  She said after all life was anything but selective, but didn’t we think that all the arts rounded out one’s appreciation of the beautiful.  Several said “How true—­how true indeed!” and sighed importantly.  Then Metta said Vernabelle must show us some of her work and Vernabelle said she could hardly bring herself to do that; but yet she could and did, getting up promptly.  She had designs for magazine covers and designs for war posters and designs for mural decorations and designs for oil paintings and so forth—­“studies; crude, unfinished bits” she called ’em, but in a tone that didn’t urge any one else to call ’em that.

It was mostly clouds and figures of females, some with ladies’ wearing apparel and many not, engaged in dancing or plucking fruit or doing up their hair.  Quite different stuff from Metta’s innocent pictures of kittens and grapes and daffodils.  After everyone was put on the easel Henrietta Templeton Price would stick her thumb up in the air and sight across it with one eye shut and say “A stunning bit, that!” and the others would gasp with delight and mutter to each other about its being simply wonderful.

Vernabelle listened in an all-too-negligent manner, putting in a tired word or two now and then.  She admitted that one or two was by way of being precious bits.  “Rather precious in an elemental way,” she would say.  “Of course I am trying to develop the psychology of the line.”  Everyone said “Oh, of course!”

While she had one up showing part of a mottled nude lady who was smiling and reaching one hand up over to about where her shoulder blades would meet in the back, who should be let in on the scene but Lon Price and Cousin Egbert Floud.  Lon had called for Henrietta, and Cousin Egbert had trailed along, I suppose, with glass blowing in mind.  Vernabelle forgot her picture and fluttered about the two new men.  I guess Lon Price is a natural-born Bohemian.  He took to her at once.