Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/124

 glass-crusted snow at the side of the house. It was like magic that in those same woods spring's warmth released these fragile blue beauties.

No more boys. They're too wild. I can pay now for movies and my own strawberry sodas. These little flowers aren't sweet, like perfume in bottles, but there is something exciting about them. Sort of horsy. Sounds crazy, but it's true.

"How would you like to go on a picnic one of these days? When it's too nice to stay indoors. We could take a lunch." Clem noticed her frown and looked down. The hepaticas were the color of the veins through her transparent skin. Perhaps she was hesitating because of the money he paid her for posing. "I'd take my sketch box and we'd work there instead of here."

He might paint himself into the composition, beard, for all the world, except the black felt hats, like Manet's "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe." There, in the woods, he would capture and hold her with himself for all time on the island of a white luncheon cloth. How disappointing, she was shaking her head.

"I can't. You know I graduate and I wouldn't want to miss a day before exams."

He had forgotten she was still a school kid. Was it possible! A relief to be reminded. It would keep his mind on work. "Well, how about Saturday?"

"I can't because Mother and I go shopping Saturday afternoons and to a show. But I could Sunday because there isn't anything to do and Mother has to visit with Aunt Mabel. My aunt wouldn't care because she's mad at me every Sunday anyway because I don't go to church."

Aunt Mabel was a joke between them. To Clem she was a shadow trailing the grey image of his mother. Two gaunt figures whose pattern was a composite portrait of Congress' morality.

When old Pastor Richards had waylayed him to ask accusingly whether he did not intend resuming attendance at church he had not had the courage to say no to the angular recording saint of his boyhood, because he knew his mother had pleaded with the neighborhood shepherd to bring the prodigal truly home. What explanation could pierce the wall of Jerusalem in those fixed unseeing eyes without offending Ma? Who were these men who took upon themselves the burden—was it a burden?—of telling others what to believe? The rosy, black-frocked priests, bloated like pregnant 112