I tell the poor old zany he sounds simple-minded himself and I can't make a lick of sense out of what he's said, except I know this village ain't spelled that way. He's telling me that's the way it's spoken anyway, and about how he brought home a glass watch chain that these Bohemians blowed at the fair, when along come Metta Bigler herself and stops to shake hands, so Cousin Egbert slinks off.
I got to tell you about Metta. She's our artist; gives lessons in oil painting and burnt wood and other refinements. People can take six lessons off Metta and go home and burn all the Indian heads on leather sofa pillows that you'd ever want to see. Also she can paint a pink fish and a copper skillet and a watermelon with one slice cut out as good as any one between here and Spokane. She's a perfectly good girl, falling on thirty, refers to herself without a pang as a bachelor girl, and dresses as quiet as even a school-teacher has to in a small town.
Well, Metta rushes up to me now, all glowing and girlish, and says I must come to her studio that very afternoon and meet her dear old chum, Vernabelle Smith, that is visiting her from Washington Square, New York. She and Vernabelle met when they were completing their art education in the Latin Quarter of Chicago, and Vernabelle had gone down to New York and got into all the new movements and among people who was doing things, and was now very, very advanced being what you might call an intellectual; but I would be sure to like her because she was so delightfully Bohemian, not standing on ceremony but darting straight to the heart of life, which is so complex to most of us who live within convention's shell and never get in touch with the great throbbing centre of things. She didn't say what things. It was a new line of chatter from Metta. Usually she'd have been telling me her troubles with Chinese help, or what a robber the Square Deal meat market was, or, at the most, how her fruit-and-fish piece had carried off the first prize of twenty dollars at the Kulanche County Fair.
So I say I'll be sure to look in on her and her new friend. I reckoned she must be the Miss Smith and the glass blower I'd already heard about that morning. Of course "Miss Smith" didn't sound like much, but Vernabelle Smith was different. That name Vernabelle made all the difference in the world. You sort of forgot the ensuing Smith.