“Sit here and tell me all about yourself,” says Vernabelle, and Lon did so while the girl hung breathless on his words.  In no time at all he was telling her about Price’s Addition to Red Gap, how you walk ten blocks and save ten dollars a block and your rent money buys a home in this, the choicest villa site on God’s green earth.  Vernabelle had sort of kept hold of Cousin Egbert’s sleeve with an absent hand—­that girl was a man hound if ever there was one—­and pretty soon she turned from Lon to Egbert and told him also to tell her all about himself.

Cousin Egbert wasn’t so glib as Lon.  He looked nervous.  He’d come expecting a little glass blowing and here was something strange.  He didn’t seem to be able to tell her all about himself.  He couldn’t start good.

“Tell me what you are reading, then,” says Vernabelle; and Cousin Egbert kind of strangled at this, too.  He finally manages to say that he tried to read Shakespere once but it was too fine print.  The old liar!  He wouldn’t read a line of Shakespere in letters a foot high.  It just showed that he, too, was trying to bluff along with the rest of ’em on this Bohemian chatter.

Vernabelle continued full of blandishment for the two men and poured ’em out stiff hookers of this demon elderberry wine and lighted cigarettes for ’em from hers.  I don’t know whether this beverage got to Lon Price or not, but in a minute he was telling her that beauty in her sex was a common-enough heritage, but how all-too rare it was to find beauty and brains in the same woman!  Vernabelle called him comrade after that, and then she was telling Cousin Egbert that he was of the great outdoors—­a man’s man!  Egbert looked kind of silly and puzzled at this.  He didn’t seem to be so darned sure about it.

Then Vernabelle worked over by the easel—­it took her about six attitudes leaning against things, to get there—­and showed her oil paintings to the newcomers.  Lon Price was full of talk and admiration and said she must do a poster for him showing a creature of rare beauty up in the clouds beckoning home-buyers out to Price’s Addition, where it was Big Lots, Little Payments, and all Nature seemed to smile.  He said this figure, however, had better have something in the shape of a garment on it because the poster would go into homes where art in its broader extent was still regarded in a suspicious or even hostile manner, if she caught what he meant.  The artist says she can readily understand, and that life after all is anything but selective.

Cousin Egbert just looked at the pictures in an uncomfortable manner.  He spoke only once and that was about the mottled lady reaching over her shoulder and smiling.  “Grinitch,” says he with a knowing leer.  But Vernabelle only says, yes, it was painted in the dear old village.