Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/26

 change of faces in the endless parade of dancers passing through Denver. Dancers with candy-pink cheeks and black eyelashes that stuck straight out. Mother said it was cascara—no, mascara—made them so black. And that beautiful twilight blue around their eyes. Their hats were fancier and curls curlier than those of the plain women on the street. Except those seen going in and out of that queer house "The Club" near home. The dancers were like cloth flowers on the millinery counters at Riland's big store. To be up there on the stage, her arms entwined with theirs, and dance back and forth with high kicks to the latest popular music would be the most wonderful thing in the world. Much better than being rich and riding around in an automobile. Of course everything at the Empire wasn't as good as the dancers. Those singers who always sang another chorus when you thought at last they were finished. And those men who talked and talked and talked because people laughed. That act in which a man dressed like a woman dancer in tights with a big train that swept the floor like the society women wore in Mode. He swished on with the silk train moving around behind in jerks and the audience laughed. Then he leaned over the footlights and he said to the orchestra leader, "What're all these people doing here—haven't they got homes?" and the audience laughed even more. Then he said how his silk train got dirty on Times Square as he crossed the street and everyone laughed some more because he said that when he stopped to lift his silk train from the gutter he heard a man—"I think it was a man"—say, "You little witch you" and, as people seemed to go crazy laughing, explained, as if talking confidentially to the whole audience, "I think he said a—witch" His name was Jimmy Watts.

"Lucy, you will please remain after class."

Miss Shaver's voice was stern but she looked down when Lucy, surprised, stared at her.

Serves her right, thought the girls as they swarmed out, Miss Shaver doesn't like her either.

Miss Shaver went to wash her hands while the two monitors for the day cleaned the blackboard. When she returned they still were beating chalk dust out the window and she sat waiting for them to leave, nervously sliding her thumbs over her clean smooth fingertips. She could not bear the feeling of chalk grit on her fingers or under pointed nails, and by the end of each afternoon the chalk dust accentuated her grating dislike of the pupils. Especially the boys, with 14