Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/350

 had from her gentleman. One day this lady say, 'Cleo, we gotta go to Philadelphia. You go to the Penn and get a compartment. We'll take two quarts Scotch, one for me, one for you.' We got on the train and took us a little drink an' she says, 'Cleo, let's drink it all—they's more where this come from.' So we drunk it all before we got to Broad Street."

"She just thinks she did," Lucy scoffed as Cleo went for more muffins.

"I gather you are a disappointment."

"She keeps hinting I ought to be kept."

Cleo returned in a talkative mood. "This lady's teeth was white as snow. She brushed on something in a bottle. One night I had a date at the Savoy Ballroom so I brush on this stuff with her little brush and my teeth they turn brown. I scrub and scrub but it wouldn't get off. Next day I tell her what I done an' she say, 'Cleo, you damn fool, that's iodine for false teeth. You got to wash it off before it dry.' Sometimes she had D.T.'s and I had to sleep with her, but she pay extra for that."

"Don't pay any attention to her, she's crazy." Lucy giggled, as Cleo shuffled out grinning. "I fire her when she takes advantage of me but I always ask her to come back. Well, if we're going to get to Clem's exhibition we'd better get started. I hope he has a crowd, I've asked everyone I know."

"You know," she chatted as they passed the Athen£e, "when I read about this place in Mode in Denver I thought it was a special place for special people. Sort of a Buckingham Palace, White House, Taj Mahal, and you had to have an invitation from Mrs. Astor or Mrs Vanderbilt or the President or Prince of Wales or Marie Antoinette to get in."

"Marie Antoinette had her head chopped off years ago."

"I know now, but I was all mixed up then, anybody important was sort of historical and yet still around. Now I know that kind of special means people with money and manners, or people with just money like Horta Cornwallis, or money and family enough not to have manners, like Figente."

"Figente has manners when he feels like it."

"That's what I mean."

I think I am perceptive but it takes Lucy to hit the nail on the head, Vida thought, recalling how one day at lunch when she was eating, Congress-fashion, fork upturned in right hand, he had screamed, "Boswell, for God's sake, you'll stab yourself!" 338