Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/163

 too. Address it to c/o Samuel Bros. Theatre, 46th St. West of Broadway, New York City. Say hello to your mother and Aunt Mabel.

A brooding jealousy of Peggy Watson, the girl who had usurped her relationship as Lucy's best friend, and surging hatred of Ma, engulfed Vida. It was no surprise that Lucy already had a special place on Broadway. That was natural. Lucy was a storybook heroine, a story she longed to continue by participation. From their first meeting Lucy had been a connecting link with the poets and romance writers because with Lucy as with poets you felt mysteriously close to life and happiness. Without Lucy, she felt condemned to Edgar Lee Masters' graveyards or to be one of Maupassant's disappointed people who seemed to be dying as they lived, a feeling that increasingly overcame her, especially when she pushed through the prickly weeds and buzzing locusts in the endless hot fields where the car line stopped to the grey cottage of Pa's second cousin. There, heavy bellied, thirsty, and wilted as the wash-line rags flapping for breath in the dry prairie wind, she would deliver some message and, looking at another Ma, wonder drearily whether she must become like Ma while Lucy was being kissed by the whole world and finding out about men and love.

"Why can't I open my own mail?" she demanded hysterically.

"A mother has a right to see what kind of friends her daughter has," Mrs. Bertrand said virtuously.

A few weeks later Lucy's photograph was in the Husker-Sun; she was naked, except for the strategically draped chiffon scarf "you know where."

This scandalous photograph was clinching proof to Mrs. Bertrand of Lucy Claudel's immorality. Simultaneously it fed her jealousy of Mae Claudel for being the mother of a beautiful girl so unlike her moody Vida.

"Don't you ever try having your picture taken like that or no matter how old you are, Pa'll whale the daylights out of you. Anyway, you'll never amount to anything running around not caring how you look and your nose into books."

Following publication of the photograph Twelfth Street and Congress itched with curiosity about this girl who had been one of them. Aunt Mabel, first ashamed, was astonished to find herself a Rh