Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/164

 celebrity. Irma Stumpf, the kindergarten teacher who taught the kids folk dances for the State Fair, was asked by some high school girls to start a dancing class which Irma was glad to do. Maybe doing that she could save enough to go to New York and study dancing and become a star too.

The photograph had arrived at the Husker-Sun syndicate-captioned Denver Girl Makes Good. But, informed by Semy of Lucy's year in Congress, Pop said, "Nuts to Denver, make it Congress."

Using Lucy's Broadway photograph to further cosmopolitanize his page, Semy reproduced one of Clem's paintings of her alongside it under the caption. Then the urge to express himself too overpowered him and, under his byline heading the page, he printed:

I could believe I am here alone, And all the world my dream; The passion of the scene is all my own, And things that seem but seem—

When complimented he shyly changed the subject, taking a chance Congress didn't read Santayana. And, offhandedly, he admitted to bug-eyed Herold Lauter that sure it was the same Lucy he had brought to the Bohemian Cellar.

Clem, too, discovered himself reflected in secondary glory. Wally Junkins, the Junior Bison who knew all about Paris France, clapped him on the back and invited him to a Smoker. His first impulse was to decline but, observing the admiration in Wally's eyes as he hospitably shoved over a tankard of near beer, Clem reprimanded himself for slipping from his resolution to be part of the Congress in which he was evolving his new manner of painting, symbolical of America.

At the Smoker he found himself made much of by Councilman Lauter. Mr. Lauter had read of public men presenting their portraits to institutions. Before the evening ended, Semy, adding his aesthetic persuasions to the "Senator's" offer of a "fair price for the order," Clem let himself be talked into painting the Councilman's portrait because in a way it was a recognition of art by the leading Congress citizen and in another was a public service because Mr. Lauter was going to spend money to donate the portrait to be hung in the lobby of the Congress Hospital, of which he was principal trustee.

Clem had considered his paintings of Lucy only experiments in what Clive Bell defined as "significant form." Now Lauter, paunchy 152