Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/306

 might be reflected in her thought. Ilona Klemper stared defiantly at her erstwhile pupil, a disrupting influence without feeling for true inner beauty.

"I'm really surprised to hear you say that, Ilona," broke in Herbie, a horse-faced young man with a high nasal voice. "To me your great, great dance has a deeper meaning. It's the expression of the purest form of passion. Minus flesh, per se. Beyond good and evil. Without reference to the bourgeois distinctions between men and women for, in the last analysis, the difference between man and woman is inconsequential, don't you think so?"

"How perceptive you are," Ilona said, beaming, "you have sensed perfectly what was in my spirit when I created 'Oestrus.' One must become part of the movement of the spheres."

"Why do you hold your hands so stiff?" asked Lucy, baffled by this exchange but determined to get a basic answer.

"The hands are the last appendages of the body and therefore the least important," Ilona replied coldly.

"They may be unimportant to you but in the Hindu dance the hands and fingers show hundreds of meanings. A Hindu dancer's hands are as well trained as the body. There are religious dances done only with the arm, hands, and fingers. And, let me tell you, it isn't easy," Lucy said, triumphant that at last she could tell Ilona something about dance.

"There are certain eternal symbols. Love, for instance. It is expressed through circular motions. Religious feeling in spirals," Ilona pontificated as she eyed Lucy wonderingly. "I had no idea you were interested in Hindu dance."

"I am studying it with Ranna, the famous dancer. We are going to give a recital."

"The Ranna whose picture is in the book Universal Dance?"

"That's the one."

That Lucy Claudel always mixed in where she didn't belong. Imagine a great artist like Ranna wasting time on her. "You must bring him. I would love to talk with him about the religious aspect of the new dance of today. I'm certain he would be interested." There might be something in creating a modern religious dance, only with arms and hands, Ilona reflected. A true American dance art ought to be an amalgam of everything.

"I'll ask him sometime," Lucy said vaguely, as it was against her practice to mix her friends, especially male. It was gratifying though to see Ilona impressed. 294