Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/140

 picnic chiefly to its pictorial possibilities in relation to his new style. But the moment they mounted the streetcar a change took place. Sitting next to Lucy, holding a lunch basket identical to those Congress marketers used, he felt uncomfortable. Dammitall, he must look foolishly domestic, more like a Congress family-man than an artist on an outing with his model. The urge to touch her was irresistible. The conductor smiled indulgently, probably because of the beard. And she was no help, either, because of the stiff little-girl way she sat. Could it be she was afraid to be alone with him in the woods? Sure made him nervous to be with her, he'd never felt like this with a Paris model or the Greenwich Village girls.

When the streetcar hit open country he had an urge to shout and stick his head out the window as on boyhood trips to river woods when his pa had jerked him back with "want to bash your brains out, you fool?"

Lucy, squinting in the breeze, bared her teeth and nodded up and down in a mechanical gesture of listening. In the streetcar she passed into the demure posture always assumed when at the movies the lights went up, a casualness calculated to detour critical glances and to suggest that the boy next to her was virtually a stranger. Her distance now was not only routine behavior with boy or man in public, but also was due to abstraction in a problem which required solution.

New York City, looming near, was the Prince one must be prepared to meet and satisfy. She could not go to him an unschooled novice. Clem was the only friend who could initiate her into the secret of love. Boys, men, Semy, wanted to touch her in all sorts of places that made her want to push them away. But she would have to learn what it was and Clem, so kind and sweet and thoughtful, was the one to teach her.

They got off at a stop in a barren area, an unfulfilled real estate development bleaching like bones of a crumbled Greek city on a parched Sicilian plain. A half mile off, the diagonal river disappeared in a haze of trees blocking the dirt road along which they walked past a No Trespassing sign.

"This sure has changed since I was a boy. Guess they're going to lay out rows of bungalows here. At least they've still not cut down the woods."

Lucy looked at Clem sidelong. He seemed so anxious to have a good time. How long since he was a boy? Harry would've been all over her by now. Hard to think of something to say to him way out 128