Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/378

 be easier to find out about those homes for unwed mothers. They would help me. If they can't, if Lucy can't, I don't know what I will do.

She peered out at the vertiginous depths from her window and, dizzied, seemed to see the lapping soft black water of the East River.

Stupid Vida who was going to find out about love the way Lucy did, she thought bitterly. There must be something the matter with me that I can't accept it as so many girls do these days, as a natural pleasure. Perhaps I have no sense of humor. No sense. Period.

The thought of release in five days to do something concrete about her pregnancy somewhat eased her fears. Still unable to sleep however or read she decided that, before forgetting the details, she might as well add the latest notes on the rehearsals in Ilona's studio in the journal she had kept sporadically since living alone.

April 18, 1925.

The dancers and their cohorts at Ilona's studio seem to me a kind of religious sect all their own. The demi-mondes of the arts, living happily in their half world on the droppings of what they hear and see.

Ranna has a pupil named Demora. She has been a Ziegfeld showgirl. Very beautiful. Tall, with straight black hair that hangs to her knees. Like Lois, she's also after Ranna. Her latest rich lover, middle-aged, calls for her at rehearsals. She runs up and puts her arms around him and says passionately, "Loverboy, I missed you so" and lover-boy preens idiotically, while all the girls giggle. Ranna is fascinated with her hair. "I will cut it off," he told Lucy and me and improvised uses for it. He would have it woven into a jacket for a costume, or tassels for a girdle, or a filet lace cover for his bed.

"That would be too scratchy," Lucy said.

"But it could be strong as a cage—I would ensnare you like a bird and laugh when you flapped your wings to escape," he said in his most syrupy tone.

"Not me, but Demora would love it, especially as it's her hair," Lucy said, too casually I thought.

One day I went to Ranna's about noon with some music and found languid Lois, her usually neat hair rumpled as though she had just awakened. She was making Ranna's breakfast with her impractical long-nailed boneless white fingers. I knew it was no victory for Lois and Ranna's revenge because Lucy had been 366