Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/379

 neglecting him, except for work. Lois has not shown up this past week so Ranna has had to rearrange his Persian garden number. One of the girls says Lois has gone off with some lieutenant.

Round and round a woman in search of love goes and where it ends nobody knows. Perhaps a Fabre could figure it out.

One of Lucy's girls, the best dancer, used to be with a well-known ballet company but gave it up because the men who came back after the show came only for the boys. The girls never had dates but sat around in their hotel rooms, which they shared four in one, playing bridge.

Another of Ranna's pupils until recently was Cinaia Goodspeed, whose mother always came to class because she did not want her daughter to grow away from her. Until she joined Ranna, Cinaia studied Duncan dancing. Unusually tall, her movement ludicrously languid in its portentous solemnity, she was extremely didactic in her pronouncements concerning dance and love. Dance, like love, she said, to be pure must be chaste. She had come to Ranna for help in creating—everybody "creates" at Ranna's—a dance to Sibelius' "Valse Triste." It was difficult not to laugh when Cinaia and Ranna, his arm always slipping lower than her waist because of her tallness, skipped around the floor. Intensely serious, she would wave her arms dreamily, lifting her long legs in slow alternation, achieving the appearance of a giraffe in a slow-motion movie. Then, quite suddenly, she and her mother became cool about Ranna because one of Ilona's girls convinced them that Lucy was not only his dancing partner. Mrs. Goodspeed told Irwin that Ranna could not be a serious artist to be engaged in an impure relationship with a common Broadway dancer. Cinaia never returned.

All the patter about art ends, one way or another, in a discussion of love. Even Ilona, with her fetish-version of abstraction and purity, watches Ranna and Lucy hot-eyed, complaining that Lucy is corrupting him as an artist. Once, as they practiced, Ilona, her mouth pinched, said to me equivocally, "I never could marry a Hindu, could you?"

I don't know which hunger is worse, no love at all strained into self-love, or disappointment in the act of love, which probably is one's own fault or insufficiency.

There was another crisis when Demora had her first costume tryout. She wore abbreviated gold trunks with gold medallions Rh