Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/195

 stuck in this dressing room. She had made up her mind not to like the man who talked in puzzles she could not understand. Sex, art, coffee, baby talk—dadadadadada—all mixed up.

She opened the door and walked in, her high heels resounding on the parquet floor. He was narrow shouldered and slender, a few inches taller than herself, and with a long narrow head that reminded her of a small painting of a sad young man with a ruff around his neck in Figente's library.

"That's a Veronese, my dear," Figente had said.

The young man turned his head toward her with only a slight lift of his eyebrows, as though she was only one of hundreds of girls he had seen come through doors.

"Paul," said Figente, "this is Lucy Claudel. Lucy, Paul Vermillion."

"Hello," she said noncommittally.

"Hello," he said with an unexpected warm smile which put her on guard because it made her feel like a child.

It was getting dark and Figente switched on the light.

"Lucy is being Leda for me," he explained, turning the modeling stand for Vermillion to see.

"Don't do much more to it," Vermillion said.

Lucy looked at it and at him to see what he meant because she thought the figure too rough. But Figente seemed very pleased. Then, turning from the figure, the strange young man looked straight at her and said to Figente, "I'd have said Olympia rather than Leda."

It might be a compliment but she wasn't certain.

"Olympia sounds to me like a bareback rider," she said.

"In a way she was," this Paul Vermillion said.

The way Figente was squealing she could tell it had something to do with sex and she looked at this Paul Vermillion without smiling. A speck of light in his eyes came straight at her, striking the base of her throat, and she had to swallow and be the one to look away first.

"I'll ring for drinks," Figente said crossly. Such exchanges between men and women revolted him.

"Not for me, thanks, I just stopped in on my way uptown," Vermillion said, wondering where Figente had found this nymph with Astarte eyes.

Lucy felt strangely piqued that he left so casually. It seemed to her that Figente could have tried to urge him to stay as she would Rh