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 reality. She was disappointed Miss Shaver did not reply and wondered suspiciously whether the fluff with the cat's eyes had intercepted her letter.

On the school platform, while classmates had wallowed in sentimental regret at breaking lifelong ties until high school next September, Lucy had beamed happily, holding the beribboned scroll, passport to being a dancer in New York City.

"For heaven's sake, why are you crying?" she demanded impatiently of weeping Vida. "I should think you'd be glad to graduate with A's in almost everything."

Vida sniffed lugubriously. "I guess it's hearing the kids sing the school song for the last time, and then—I don't know what's going to happen to me."

"Well, for goodness' sake, cheer up. You'll grow up like everyone else—what's so awful about that?"

Chapter 12

THE PICNIC

after graduation, as though nature planned it, on a warm clear Tuesday Clem took Lucy for the delayed picnic. During the last weeks of school she had been absorbed in examinations, graduating with marks only slightly below the first shining five, and this preoccupation had curtailed the time she could be at the studio.

Clem thus had had more time to devote himself to painting in his American manner. When the painting had been finished with finely drawn-in sepia lines he had been disappointed varnish was necessary to unify the canvas. Varnish was an old-hat concession. Also his landscape was flat, but this he attributed to prairie light, arguing that Nebraska was bright and sharp, new and clean. Even the billboard giants, with their toothy smiles, had their rightful place, comparable to the African art decadent Paris now idolized. And there was that American writer in Paris who had said at the Dôme that advertising was the American art in literature and painting, and was writing an 126