Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/177

 all, ballet was the important thing in life. Besides any day now the time was coming, as it always did with every boy or man she'd gone out with, when Lyle wasn't going to be just satisfied with taking her to parties and good-night kisses. He already had brought up the subject and when she said quickly "I'm only fifteen," his eyes had been scared. Peggy Watson had said "You're jailbait!" Of course you always had to kiss a man who took you out. Lyle's lips were too full and smooth, like a balloon. The trouble was that Mother was crazy about him. That was one nice thing about Lyle, he always treated Mother so nice, bringing her flowers too when he came with orchids, and boxes of those Huyler's assorted chocolates she likes. Not the chewy ones bad for her fillings.

In July Lyle Bigelow, chafing at his equivocal role of unrewarded lover and disturbed at finding himself bewitched by the first girl in his experience who could not be bought, cajoled or forced, went to spend the summer at his mother's house in Newport hoping Lucy would miss him.

In a way she did. While she refused furs and jewels, except for a seed pearl bird with which to fasten orchids, as florist's pins scratched, he had given her what she considered gifts of far greater value. She would have bought the pin anyway, and could buy herself modest furs and jewels with no strings attached. But what she could not have done by herself, or as well through any other man, was Lyle's gift of the best possible view of that gay world come to life from the photographic pages of Mode. And he had given her a friend, Figente. Moreover, through Lyle's persistence in taking her everywhere she had attained an enviable social position on Broadway as its No. One Mistress. No one dreamed, not even Peggy Watson would believe, that she wasn't. Out of sporting loyalty to Lyle she did not disillusion Broadway. It wasn't important she wasn't his mistress, except to herself. All up-to-date girls were learning fast, even the society girls at Figente's, that free love wasn't only for men. Tessie Soler had said one night as they waited for cue in the wings, "Here's one for the book—my niece in Oswego wrote and asked me if I knew any new tricks she could try!"

Figente too was in Newport at his sister's. She had asked him about Carly and had been told he was playing polo in the Argentine.

"My goodness," she had asked in wonderment, "don't any of those boys have to work?" Rh