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.
Feeling ran high, I want to tell you, and a few of the younger set fell out of the ranks of good old Bohemia--or was yanked out. Luella Stultz's father, who is old-fashioned, it was said, had give Luella a good licking for smoking cigarettes, and old Jesse Himebaugh had threatened his daughter Gussie with the reform school if she didn't stop trying to get away from it all. Even Beryl Mae's aunt put her foot down. Beryl Mae met me in the post office one day and says auntie won't let her be a Bohemian any more, having threatened to take her new ukulele away from her if she goes to that Latin Quarter another single time; and poor Beryl Mae having hoped to do a Hawaiian dance in native costume for the intimate theatre, where it wouldn't be misunderstood!