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 paint their faces emerald and purple. The effects of this æsthetic saturnalia are manifest even today.

Fresh from the quieter insanity of Florence, Edith was intensely amused by all this. It seemed so extraordinarily droll to find the great public awake to the excitement of art. She surrounded herself with as many storm centres as possible. The crowds flocked to her place and she made them comfortable. Pinchbottles and Curtis Cigarettes, poured by the hundreds from their neat pine boxes into white bowls, trays of Virginia ham and white Gorgonzola sandwiches, pale Italian boys in aprons, and a Knabe piano were added to the decorations. Arthur Lee and Lee Simonson, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, Max Weber, Charles Demuth, Bobby Jones—just out of college and not yet a designer of scenery—, Bobby Parker, all the jeunes were, confronted with dowagers from the upper East Side, old family friends, Hutchins Hapgood, Ridgely Torrence, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and pretty women. Arguments and discussions floated in the air, were caught and twisted and hauled and tied, until the white salon itself was no longer static. There were undercurrents of emotion and sex.

Edith was the focus of the group, grasping this faint idea or that frail theory, tossing it back a complete or wrecked formula, or she sat quietly with her hands folded, like a Madonna who had lived long enough to learn to listen. Sometimes she was not even at home, for the drawing-room was generally