Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/208

 love the way one thought it should be anyway. Maybe it was always the same, like Frank in Denver, Harry and Clem in Congress, Carly, Lyle. Nothing but the act. Or like the tarlatan of a ballet skirt. Looks better from the audience. Vida and her old poets!

When they were settled in the apartment, the show went into its second year with unabated success. Lucy fell into a routine of dawdling in bed or about shops until it was time for Master's. Sporadically she attended Ilona Klemper's class. With Mae's approval, she rejected recurrent offers of roles in Hollywood, which seemed exile to them, saying she was a dancer not an actress. Then, paradoxically, she enrolled in a dramatic school so she could act when too old to dance.

"I might as well admit," she told Mae, "I'll never do thirty fouettés: those kids at Master's are like mosquitoes, they never get tired. But I'll never get a star part unless I can read lines. Just the same, I feel silly when Madame Clement makes me read Juliet in a stage voice. I could do it if she let me be natural. It's certainly hard work talking stage English like Ethel Barrymore. She talks like that offstage too. It comes from the diaphragm. Soler speaks that way too."

"But, darling, no one wants you to talk like Ethel Barrymore."

"Madame Clement does," Lucy said, and they laughed because it was such a joke.

At Figente's she announced to him and Vermillion, "Don't be surprised if I talk English the next time you see me. Like this. 'RRRomeo RRRomeo wheafoah aht thou RRRomeo?' Isn't that pretty good? At first I couldn't get it, then I made Cleo show me how. She's from South Carolina. You'd like her."

"She sounds absolutely fascinating." Figente was mock-solemn. "I must give a dinner for her."

"You're not her type." She laughed and, turning to Vermillion who was transforming a blob from a leaky fountain pen into a wicked drawing of Figente, asked, "How did you think I sounded?"

"I think Shakespeare would have approved of you as Juliet—any Romeo would."

She didn't know how to take this. "What do you know about poets—you're just an artist."

"That is the question." The poor joke was lost on her, he thought, wincing at having said the line. His drawing of Simone on Figente's mantelpiece caught his eye. The printer's ink flat black area 196