Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/25

. She did not even regret having married Charles, for then she might never have had Lucy.

"You know," said Lucy as she pulled off her stockings, "I like boys who don't just want to pet but who can tell me things. I just love people to tell me things. I guess that's why I like arithmetic, the problems always come out right. That's why I love to look at Mode. It tells you all the latest styles and shows you pictures of people all over. Did you bring the new Mode?"

"Not yet, I'll get it Friday."

Friday was payday at the shirt factory. Mae put aside the dress she was lengthening and began to undress.

Lucy stood hesitant. The thought of the toilet down the hall and a cockroach scurrying into a hole next to the pipes repelled her. She pulled up her skirts and jumped onto the hand basin.

"I might as well go here. I hate that dirty old toilet."

Mae counted the rag curlers into her hand.

"Hurry up and brush your teeth so I can do your hair," she said.

It was almost time for the one o'clock bell to call the pupils back for afternoon classes. Lucy got up from the window ledge of the basement manual-training room and brushed off the seat of her sky-blue dress. Stray lambkin clouds drifted lazily in the early June sky. She blew up the paper bag which had contained her lunch and, raising her left leg high like the dancers at the Empire, exploded the balloon under the knee.

The trick was to lift the leg slowly.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk," rebuked girls, who would fail at high kicks in their bedrooms that night. The boys missed catches in their ball throwing because their eyes traveled over the hypnotizing territory between the pointed toe and the pink span of a 90-degree angle.

After the 3:30 bell rang and the 7th grade pupils sat awaiting release, Miss Shaver hesitated before giving the word. Those whose conduct or lessons had been reprehensible squirmed for fear they would be called upon to remain for punishment. But Lucy, calm in the knowledge that she had been as always an exemplary student, sat confident that in a moment she would be on her way to watch the performers at the Empire Theatre rushing out of the stage entrance alley to Child's for between-shows coffee.

She did this often, having discovered this past year the Rh