Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/141

 here in the middle of nowhere. An outraged crow screamed complaint at this week-day invasion, but an impertinent sparrow went about his endless business undisturbed.

"Isn't as windy here as on the streetcar, is it?" Lucy said, to say something.

"All those open windows, I guess," agreed Clem inanely, wondering if the pounding in his head was a summer cold.

"Darn it!" Her ankle had turned in a rut. "Guess I should've worn gym sneakers. It's good my ankles are strong from dance practice."

Clem glanced down at the delicate involute uniting the long convolute of the two columns to their tottering base and wondered wherein lay the strength. Must be a question of balance, like the point upon which the obelisk stood in the Place de la Concorde. Best keep one's mind on Egyptian engineering and art.

In the manner of all picnickers they tried and rejected a number of spots as too damp, sunny, not comfortable, or because a little green snake wriggled from under a rock. Finally they settled on a mossy, sun-patterned carpet barricaded by black trunks of trees and swords of fern, while all around still young leaves framed them in a vernal spell.

Lucy gathered the silken folds of last summer's blue flowered dress preparatory to choosing a place to sit.

"I'm hungry, aren't you?" Clem said, to break the enchantment of seeing her stand blended with the leaves in an alloy of Botticelli harmonic lucency.

He spread the white cloth, directed by Manet's ghost, and laid out the sandwiches Mrs. Brush had made in the belief that the friend to share them was a man. At the studio he had prepared a thermos of coffee, with milk and sugar in deference to Lucy's taste, and, more for its pictorial effect than to drink, added to the basket a raffia bottle of Chianti. In the center he built a still life of tasteless but beautiful storage fruit selected in Congress' one luxury store.

Lucy's appetite, never delicate as might be imagined from her slender contours, was whetted by the quantity of food issuing from the basket, a magician's hat.

"There's enough for a dozen," she piped delightedly and, pulling up her skirts, sat down on a pebble, cried "ouch" and jumped up to pull the skirts down again.

Clem laughed, took off his jacket and tossed it across. "Here, sit on this."

She closed her eyes as her teeth sank through Mrs. Brush's Rh