The early Greeks must of been strong on art jewellery.  Vernabelle clanked at every step with bracelets and anklets and necklaces.  She had a priceless ruby weighing half a pound fastened to the middle of her bony forehead.  Her costume was spangled, but not many spangles had been needed.  The early Greeks couldn’t of been a dressy lot.  If Vernabelle had been my daughter I could of give her what she deserved with almost no trouble.  The costume, as Metta had said, not only followed the lines of the figure, so far as it went anywhere at all, but it suggested and almost revealed that Vernabelle had been badly assembled.  The Bohemians kind of gasped and shivered, all except Jeff Tuttle, who applauded loudly.  They seemed to feel that Vernabelle was indeed getting away from it all.

Then came this here cycle-of-dance portrayals.  The first one wasn’t much dance; it was mostly slow, snaky motions with the arms and other things, and it was to portray a mother cobra mourning her first-born.  At least that’s the way I understood it.  Another one was called “The Striving Soul,” to which the prof played something livelier.  Vernabelle went round and round, lifting her feet high.  It looked to me like she was climbing a spiral staircase that wasn’t there.  Then she was a hunted fawn in a dark forest and was finally shot through the heart by a cruel hunter—­who was probably nearsighted.  And in the last one she was a Russian peasant that has got stewed on vodka at the Russian county fair.  This was the best one.  You couldn’t see her so well when she moved quick.

Of course there was hearty applause when it was all over, and pretty soon Vernabelle come out again in her kimono.  Panting like a tuckered hound she was when the comrades gathered to tell her how wonderful she had been.

“That music tears me,” says Vernabelle, putting her hands to her chest to show where it tore.  “That last maddening Russian bit—­it leaves me like a limp lily!” So she was led to the punch bowl by Comrades Price and Tuttle, with the others pushing after and lighting cigarettes for her.

It was agreed that the evening had been a triumph for Vernabelle’s art.  Almost every Bohemian present, it seemed, had either been tore or maddened by that last Russian bit.

Vernabelle was soon saying that if she had one message for us it was the sacred message of beauty.  Jeff Tuttle says, “You’ve certainly delivered it, little woman!” Vernabelle says, oh, perhaps, in her poor, weak way—­she was being a limp lily against the piano then—­but art is a terrible master to serve, demanding one’s all.  Comrade Price says what more could she give than she has to-night.  And then, first thing I know, they’re all talking about an intimate theatre.

This was another part of Vernabelle’s message.  It seems intimate theatres is all the rage in New York, and the Bigler barn is just the place to have one in.  Vernabelle says they will use the big part where the hay used to be and paint their own scenery and act their own plays and thus find a splendid means of self-expression the way people of the real sort are doing in large cities.