Then the crowd sort of got together on the couch and in chairs and Vernabelle talked for one and all.  She said how stimulating it was for a few of the real people who did things to come together in this way after the day’s turmoil—­to get away from it all!  Beryl Mae said she had often wanted to get away from it all, but her aunt was narrow-minded.  Henrietta Price lighted her ninth cigarette and said how it reminded her of the Latin Quarter of Paris, which she had never been to, but her cousin had spent a whole afternoon there once and had been simply wild about it.  Vernabelle said it was times like this, with a few real people, that she got her biggest ideas; that life in the rough was too terribly a labyrinth, didn’t we think, stunning one with its immensity, while in these dear little half-lighted moments the real came out unafraid, if we understood what she meant.  Many of us said we did.

It was when we got up to go that Vernabelle told me things about Cousin Egbert.  She said he must have great reserve strength in his personality.  She said he fairly frightened her, he was so superbly elemental.

“It is not so much Mr. Floud that frightens me,” says she, “as the inevitability of him—­just beautifully that!  And such sang fraw!”

Poor Egbert was where he had to overhear this, and I had never seen him less sang fraw—­if that’s the word.  He looked more like a case of nettle rash, especially when Vernabelle gripped his hand at parting and called him comrade!

We finally groped our way through the smoke of the door and said what a lovely time we’d had, and Metta said we must make a practice of dropping in at this hour.  Vernabelle called us all comrade and said the time had been by way of being a series of precious moments to her, even if these little studio affairs did always leave poor her like a limp lily.  Yep; that’s the term she used and she was draped down a bookcase when she said it, trying to look as near as possible like a limp lily.

The awestruck group split up outside.  Nothing like this had ever entered our dull lives, and it was too soon to talk about it.  Cousin Egbert walked downtown with me and even he said only a few little things.  He still called the lady a glass blower, and said if she must paint at all why not paint family pictures that could be hung in the home.  He said, what with every barroom in the state closed, there couldn’t be much demand for them Grinitch paintings.  He also said, after another block, that if he owned this lady and wanted to get her in shape to sell he’d put her out on short sand grass, short almost to the roots, where she’d wear her teeth down.  And a block later he said she hadn’t ought to be calling everyone comrade that way—­it sounded too much like a German.  Still and all, he said, there was something about her.  He didn’t say what.