MacLachan mumbled something about undue influence.

“Did I get arrested?”

MacLachan grunted.

“In a cellar?”

MacLachan snorted.

“With my nose painted green?”

MacLachan groaned.  “There was others,” he pleaded.

“A man of your age and influence in Our Square,” I interrupted sternly, “should have been dissuading them.”

“Arr ye designin’ to put all that in yer sil—­in yer interestin’ account?”

“Every detail.”

MacLachan dislodged my crook from his leg, gave me such a look as mid-Victorian painters strove for in pictures of the Dying Stag, and retired to his Home of Fashion.

* * * * *

That men of the sobriety and standing of Cyrus the Gaunt, MacLachan, Leon Coventry, the Little Red Doctor, and Boggs (I do not count young Phil Stacey, for he was insane at the time, and has been so, with modifications and glorifications, ever since) should paint their noses green and frequent dubious cellars, calls for explanation.  The explanation is Barbran.

Barbran came to us from the immeasurable distances; to wit, Washington Square.

Let me confess at once that we are a bit supercilious in our attitude toward the sister Square far to our West, across the Alps of Broadway.  Our Square was an established center of the social respectabilities when the foot of Fifth Avenue was still frequented by the occasional cow whose wanderings are responsible for the street-plan of Greenwich Village.  Our Square remains true to the ancient and simple traditions, whereas Washington Square has grown long hair, smeared its fingers with paint and its lips with free verse, and gone into debt for its inconsiderable laundry bills.  Washington Square we suspect of playing at life; Our Square has a sufficiently hard time living it.  We have little in common.

Nevertheless, it must be admitted that there are veritable humans, not wholly submerged in the crowd of self-conscious mummers who crowd the Occidental park-space, and it was at the house of one of these, a woman architect with a golden dream of rebuilding Greenwich Village, street by street, into something simple and beautiful and, in the larger sense urban, that the Bonnie Lassie, whose artistic deviations often take her far afield, met Barbran.

They went for coffee to a queer little burrow decorated with improving sentiments from the immortal Lewis Carroll which, Barbran told the Bonnie Lassie, was making its blue-smocked, bobbed-haired, attractive and shrewd little proprietress quite rich.  Barbran hinted that she was thinking of improving on the Mole’s Hole idea if she could find a suitable location, not so much for the money, of course—­her tone implied a lordly indifference to such considerations—­as for the fun of the thing.

The Bonnie Lassie was amused but not impressed.  What did impress her about Barbran was a certain gay yet restful charm; the sort of difficult thing that our indomitable sculptress loves to catch and fix in her wonderful little bronzes.  She set about catching Barbran.