Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/299

 seems to work, everyone likes him but me. The way he behaves reminds me of something—what's the word? Funny, but with Clem and Semy she felt older, more experienced. Yet with Vermillion and Simone she felt too young. With Figente, Vida, and Ranna no age at all.

That was a good thing about working with Ranna. Learning his artistic type of dance it was a good feeling not to worry, as at Master's, because you couldn't compete with kid speed demons of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen who never tired. Master said one could be a great ballerina without being an acrobat. Not on Broadway, where they expected all sorts of tricks and jazz sur le point. In a recital it would be different: Beman would see she was an artist and would star her in that musical play about a dancer. She was happier than in a long time. At last, she thought, I'm on the right track. All I need now are some ideas for numbers. But what?

After six lessons with Ranna she was getting the hang of the new way to walk and use her arms, though it was still hard to remember how to use her fingers as symbols at the same time. The straight forward step, knees soft and unarched foot, still made her feel off balance. The biggest surprise was that ballet was not a foundation for any different form of art dance. Jazz and taps were a thing apart.

"I wish you had a mirror wall so I can see whether I'm right," she had told Ranna one day when she felt all unrelated appendages.

"No, no. You cannot dance and watch yourself. You must learn to see with sense of touch," he had replied, and she had tried moving with her eyes closed, which was not easy in the furniture-jammed area.

Sometimes he put on a record and danced for her. His finger symbols, the turnings and thrustings of his head, the movement of his eyes, and extraordinary independence of his neck, correlated with the virile angularities of arms and legs, fascinated her as a rhythmic puzzle. His flat torso recalled an Egyptian frieze she had seen at the Metropolitan. What was bewildering was that these gestures had endless meanings depending upon the subject of the dance.

"I ought to write it down so I can study it like a sign language," she had said one day when everything seemed beyond memorizing. They would sit, Lotus position, feet resting on opposite thighs, facing each other, she copying his hand movements, laughing as children in a game.

When it came to her dancing, he had once said, "Not so strong. Your movement must flow as a slowly running river. You must be Rh