accepted her as Pearl Jane. It was as yet a question what she would sign her masterpieces of art, as she hadn’t, strictly speaking, produced them yet.
She hadn’t been in the city very long, but Washington Square claimed her for its own. She loved it—all four sides—and many of its byways. She dabbled away, with a brush that was, so far, incompetent and irrelevant, but she cheerfully insisted that she was finding herself, and that some day she would paint pictures like Tommy’s.
“Heaven forfend!” Post would cry out. “If you must copy, choose the billboard school, or the newspaper cartoon group, but don’t take aim for Tommy’s greenery dingles and blue glades.”
“Beautiful title!” Tommy mused; “‘The Blue Glades of Glengowrie’—I’ll do that next.”
“And that reminds me,” Kate said, she was always being inscrutably reminded, “our infant here, our Pearl Jane, has never been to a masquerade! A real one, I mean. She doesn’t count the Ivy Club Sociables in her Main Street home. Will you have one for her, Tommy? We’ll all help.”
“Better yet, I’ll paint one for her,” Locke said; “then she can see how one really looks.”
“No, she can’t,” Post declared. “You see, in your pictures, so much more is meant than meets the eye—and Pearl Jane wants her eyes met.”
“All right, then,” and Locke thought a minute. “Not a very big one, you said, didn’t you? And, no one asked but our own crowd, you insisted on, didn’t you? And you stipulated it would be small and early—am I not right? And if I am not mistaken, you said there’s no hurry about it.”
But he was set right on all these points, and the masquerade party for Pearl Jane was arranged in exactly the
