Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/138

 or digging his great hands into the mauve tapestry with which the divan was upholstered. Miners, garment-workers, and, silk-weavers were the honoured guests in those days. The artists still came but the centre of interest had shifted. Almost half of every day, Edith now spent in Paterson, New Jersey, where the strike of the hour was going on, attending union meetings and helping to carry pickets back and forth in her motor. She continued to be diverted by the ironies and complexities of life.

Recruits to the circle arrived from Europe—for Edith knew half of Europe—; solemn celebrities, tramps, upper Fifth Avenue, Gramercy Park, Greenwich Village, a few actresses—I took Fania Marinoff there several times—were all mixed up with green glass vases, filled with fragrant white lilies, salmon snapdragons, and blue larkspurs, pinchbottles, cigarette stubs, Lincoln Steffens, and the paintings of Marsden Hartley and Arthur B. Davies. Over the whole floated the dominant odours of Coty's chypre and stale beer.

Edith herself was young—about thirty-four—and comely, with a face that could express anything or nothing more easily than any face I have ever seen. It was a perfect mask. She wore lovely gowns of clinging turquoise blue, spinel, and jacinth silks from Liberty's. When she went out, she wrapped herself in more soft silks of contrasting shades, and donned such a hat as Donatello's David