Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/31

 Mae looked at the colored facets and black lines of a Picasso painting.

"Oh, a ballet is dancing on toes. Dancers have to have their toes broken to stand on them. It certainly is a crazy picture. Doesn't look like dancing to me."

"I wonder," said Lucy, frowning critically at the Picasso reproduction, "if it costs a lot to take dancing lessons. I'd love to learn to dance at that school in the Lode Building."

Mae considered. "That's funny, dear, I was thinking the same thing."

Lucy kicked high left and right in the glee of a young bacchante. "Oh, you and me always like the same things."

Mae beamed happily.

"I wonder if taking lessons is awfully dear," said Lucy.

The ever-present obstacle loomed. Tire soft contours of Mae's face sagged. Hard enough to scrape together Lucy's milk pennies. Mae did this by doing without lunch herself. Mae never had felt so helpless and alone, even when that man had evicted them from the roominghouse because she wouldn't, and they had to spend the night in the cold railroad station. An unsteady step creaked up the stairs outside their door. Why of course!—there was the little room upstairs.

"The back room upstairs is vacant—that's a dollar and a half cheaper," Mae said.

"Oh boy, what luck!"

They hugged each other happily in contemplation of the unexpected windfall.

On Saturday afternoon, when Mae came from work, they helped each other dress in their best and went to interview Miss Ilona Klemper—"Formerly with Fokine."

The skinny woman with the thin mouth and narrow-set eyes did not seem to believe that Lucy was only twelve. Mae's awe of the unfriendly teacher was multiplied by a kind of diffident dizziness at seeing Lucy and herself mirrored tinily across the vast expanse of the studio floor. Lucy's hem, she noted, distressed, dipped on the left. The reflected expanse unaccountably recalled frighteningly her wedding journey across the lonely flat unending plains and then up and up to the dizzying big city while the strange man Rh