Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/339

 months he had loved her. She would drag the girl into the sphere to which Paul had excommunicated her.

"Some day, ma petite," she said with a brittle laugh, "we must show Paul how irresistible you are lying in my robe du Maroc."

Lucy's lips parted and she stared at Simone. Horta's fly eyes glittered and Tessie thought w'hat a story to tell on Claudel. Semy and Clem were baffled by the exchange and Vida thought of making a denial but refrained, as that might make it sound worse. Beman, thinking so that's why she turned down Bigelow, cleared his throat and said to Vedder, "By the way, have you been to the new Henri Quatre? They do tripe à la mode de Caen very well."

Vermillion was angry at being caught between two pities. More so for Simone than Lucy. With Lucy one had the sense that she was growing into maturity through intuitive self-teaching and this might lead to detours of experimentation. The way one learned to paint, each canvas a new beginning. Of course there always was present the unseen angel or devil of cumulative knowledge to add its two cents to the result. Thus, even if true, in Lucy it probably was curiosity. Simone was different. In Paris there had been those types who could not resist informing him of the rumors of her sexual deviations. These might or not be true. If true, knowing her as he did, it was another white powder to make life bearable. There was in her a malignant hurt no one or anything could salve, it festered in her uncontrollable destructive urges as the one now possessing her. Yet tonight, as they talked gaily with Kevin Doyle, she had seemed again the Simone he first knew and he had anticipated their returning later to his or her place. An urge deadened often before by her obsessive possessiveness.

As Lucy was no match for Simone's talent for unanswerable implications, he said, to bridge the awkward silence, "I doubt whether any painter would choose that as Lucy's characteristic pose."

"But I can imagine nothing more charming than Miss Claudel as Odalisque," contributed the Marqués gallantly.

Anyway, thought Lucy, none of the men believe it.

Simone sat with arms folded in warming self-embrace until the moment she could rescue herself from the situation she had wished to avert. With artificial roguishness she threw up her hands and rose, saying, "I give up. He is too difficult to please, absolutely refusing to exhibit his work. What is one to do with such a gosse!"

The revenge of a general laugh at Vermillion's expense carried her up to the bedroom. The confident smirk of the Lucyesque beauty Rh