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.
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!"