Everyone is wild about this in a minute, and says how quaint and jolly Bohemian it will be.  The Bigler barn is just the place, with no horse there since Metta bought one of the best-selling cars that ever came out of Michigan, and Vernabelle says she has written a couple of stunning little one-act pieces, too powerful for the big theatres because they go right to the throbbing raw of life, and it will be an inspiration and uplift to the community, of which all present can be proud.  Lon Price says he will furnish a good drop curtain free, painted with a choice nine-room villa with just a line mentioning Price’s Addition to Red Gap, Big Lots, Little Payments.  And he’s quite hurt when Vernabelle tells him no, that they must keep entirely out of the slime of commercialism.  I don’t think Lon ever again felt the same toward Vernabelle—­calling his business slime, that way.

However, the party broke up full of plans for the new intimate theatre, leaving an empty punch bowl and a million cigarette ends.

And right here was where the Philistine opposition braided feathers in its hair and done a war dance.  Members of the little group that did things spoke freely the next day of Vernabelle’s art in the dance and her early Greek costume, taking a mean enjoyment in the horror they inspired among pillars of the church and the civic purity league.  It is probable that in their artistic relish they endowed Vernabelle with even fewer clothes than she had wore.  At any rate, they left a whole lot to be inferred, and it promptly was inferred.

The opposition now said this was no job for a chamber of commerce; it had become a simple matter for the police.  The civic purity league had a special meeting at which the rind was peeled off Vernabelle’s moral character, and the following Sabbath one of the ministers gave a hot sermon in which the fate of Babylon and a few other undesirable residence centres mentioned in the Bible was pointed out.  He said that so-called Bohemia was the gateway to hell.  He never minced his words, not once.

And the Latin Quarter come in for some more shock assaults when the talk about an intimate theatre in the Bigler barn got out.  The regular theatre was bad enough, said the civic purity league; in fact, they had started a campaign against that the month before, right after a one-night engagement of the Jolly Paris Divorcees Burlesque Company, which, I gathered, had not upheld the very highest standards of dramatic art.  And if the town was going to stand for anything more intimate than this show had provided, why, it was time for drastic action if any wholesome family life was to be saved from the wreck.