Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/35

 "My goodness, it certainly takes a lot of extra things to have dancing lessons," Lucy said on the way home. "It's going to cost too much. Maybe Aunt Mabel will send me some money for my thirteenth birthday."

"I wouldn't count on it," Mae said wryly.

Forbidding Mabel, self-righteously alone in the small Nebraska house in which she and Mae had been born, always saying no to everything nice, hating everyone, everything, even grudging a kitten a teaspoon of milk. She remembered how when they both were children Mabel used to wait for the kitten to reach the milk and, just as the sweet thing was about to lap, take the saucer away. She's not going to do that to my darling Pussy.

"Well, my goodness, I'd think she'd want to give her only niece a present."

"I guess she doesn't think about us—how could she know about us—I never write her."

Mabel, thought Mae, would write back saying—I expected it. I knew, sooner or later, you would come begging to me for money. Well, you can come back if you want to, you are my sister, and half of the house is yours, according to the will.

"Maybe you ought to write her," Lucy said.

"Oh no, dear. Mabel would think we ought to come and live with her in Congress." Live in the country—whatever for! Denver was a city, and you could learn ballet, and dance in the Empire line. What could you do in Congress? Lucy lost interest in Aunt Mabel.

The end of June Lucy was thirteen, promoted to 8th grade, and fairly steady on her toes.

Despite the strenuous practicing her body was rounding gently and Frank felt some day he would have to do something, beat her, to impress on her his growing self. It puzzled him that she had grown more rather than less remote each succeeding week, but he could not keep away from her. His parents, nagged by Opal, had ordered him to, and he had tried to out of pique. But she didn't seem to care. The other night he just touched her hand at the movie and she had looked at him as though he were a stranger. She hadn't said not to—but he couldn't touch her again that night. And telling him he acted young—why he was almost three years older!

Lucy now felt distaste for Frank's hot demands. Why couldn't he Rh