Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/286

 coming to have an exhibition. He'll be here the fifteenth of November."

"Well, good for Clem," Lucy said unenthusiastically.

"I should think you'd be more pleased. After all you were very good friends."

"I know, but it seems such a long time ago. For your sake, I'm glad he's coming."

"Stop shoving him off on me, though I do like him and I'll be glad to see him. And that reminds me. I'll be finished at Ilona's at four. Come along to see the Kandinsky exhibition."

"I'd love to, but I've a date. If I don't see you before, come to the theatre. We'll go dancing with two of the boys after. Wear the black."

"I'll see. So long."

"Tell Mam'selle I'm asleep. I don't want her in here. I wish Cleo were back."

Alone, Lucy contemplated going to the eleven o'clock class at Master's. She decided instead to relax and read Vida's Yeats poetry to get into the proper mood for the visit to Ranna that afternoon.

From Kashmir to Paris, Ranna had floated with silken grace on a magic carpet of five-pound notes given him in homage of his accomplishments in dance and lovemaking by a titled Englishwoman visiting India. In the City of Light, Lady Crest could not resist showing off the beautiful boy and unwisely chose the 17th century drawing room of Madame La Comtesse de Nuage, an occasional patroness of the arts—preferably of her own paintings, only one of which she modestly permitted to be hung in her salon flanked by a Goya and a Picasso. There Ranna's rhythmically erotic movements had mesmerized Lady Duckworth, once of Plumbago, Ohio, Plumbing Equipments, Inc., who provided a richer magic carpet of ten-pound notes to her London salon, and boudoir. Then she in turn lost him to a compatriot, Mrs. Custerd of Boston and Marblehead, Mass., who with the even greater magic of dollars had whisked him across the Atlantic as easily as a cash basket on a department store wire. Of course she did not whisk him to Boston where art and love are separately practiced, and where son and daughter-in-law cherished their inheritance equally with her. Except however to have him dance at an afternoon musicale for the ladies of the Colony, 274