Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/321

 is," he said ingratiatingly. Vida was clever, he thought, to get herself in solid with this important Figente who had snubbed Clem. He mustn't offend her.

Clem was still smarting from Figente's snub, especially embarrassing because he had told Semy and Vedder of visits to this house. "I was telling Vedder," he said, "that I saw this Modigliani and that Braque when I was here a few years ago. I guess Figente doesn't remember, I had a beard then, or maybe he's growing old."

"He said you want to see the other paintings. I'll take you to his studio—it's in the carriage house across the court."

Vedder pulled from the rack a canvas on which a monumental sand-colored woman reclined against a flat blue sky; then another in primary colors of a figure-eight Cyclops with a coxcomb against variformed lozenges, all divided by heavy black lines and unified by occasional cross bars and a block of floral design.

Clem examined the Picassos sourly. One thought the fellow finally had shot his bolt and now he came up with something new for New York to fall for. No American art could come out of this city because its inhabitants were foreigners without grass-root ties in this country. You couldn't expect immigrants w'ho didn't stay put in their own countries to understand anything but change. The Picassos gave him a queasy feeling about the reception of his coming exhibition.

"I think they're great," pronounced Semy. Actually he didn't see what was so wonderful about them, but Figente and Vedder were pretty safe guides as to what was what. Apparently Clem wasn't. Pretending not to notice Clem's look which inquired what he knew about it, he went to examine a small terra cotta of a semi-reclining woman on a modeling stand.

"Don't touch those things, Herold, they are priceless antiques," Vida said sharply to the offender snuffling out his cigarette on a Rhodes Byzantine plate.

"This Leda is beautiful, I'm nuts about Greek art," Semy said reverently.

"That's Lucy, Figente did it in Greco-Roman style," Vida said, and wished she hadn't as Semy couldn't stand being corrected. Lucy said men wanted women to be baby dolls, to dress and undress, and show off in public. They didn't want you to know anything except what they told you, so if she was smart a woman kept what she knew to herself. That's what she was going to do tonight. She wasn't going to say one more thing about anything, just have fun. Rh