occupied from ten in the morning until midnight. Sometimes—very often, indeed—, she left her guests without a sign and went to bed. Sometimes—and this happened still oftener—, she remained in the room, without being present. Andrew Dasburg commemorated this aspect in a painting which he called The Absence of Edith Dale. But always, and Dasburg suggested this in his flame-like portrait, her electric energy presided. She was the amalgam which held the incongruous group together; she was the alembic that turned the dross to gold.
When dulness, beating its tiresome wings, seemed about to hover over the group, she had a habit of introducing new elements into the discussion, or new figures into the group itself, and one day it must have occurred to her that, if people could become so excited about art, they might be persuaded to become excited about themselves too, and so she transferred her interest to the labouring man, to unions, to strikes, to the I. W. W. I remember the first time I saw her talking earnestly with a rough member of the garment-maker's union. Two days later, Bill Haywood, himself, came in and the tremendous presence of the one-eyed giant filled the room, seeming to give it a new consecration. Débutantes knelt on the floor beside him, while he talked simply, but with an enthralling intensity, about the things that interested him, reinforcing his points by crushing the heels of his huge boots into the Shirvan rug
