Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/38

 bunchy. One day she saw Miss Klemper looking at her in the mirror the way Opal did and when their eyes met she bit her lip and asked what Lucy was thinking about.

"I was wondering how old you are," Lucy said.

"I'm only twenty-four, if you must know," Miss Klemper snapped crossly.

She seemed older than Miss Shaver or Mother, too old for a beau or to be a dancer at the Empire. But there was one thing about ballet, you could hardly keep up with all the things to learn. Not like with boys when all you got out of that was a soda. But ragtime was fun too. Dance hall managers were mean, throwing you out because you were too young. What did that mean, too young for what?

Lucy jumped up and did a few changements, and the clerk in the room below pounded on the ceiling with his umbrella.

"Relevé, relevé, assemblé."

They went to bed. After a while they stopped whispering, just like sisters, Mae thought, except that Mabel never was sweet like her darling Pussy. Then it was quiet in the dark corner of the rancid hall which was Lucy's home, nurturing and protecting her, a white orchid feeding on shaded humid air.

An upheaval knocked down the protecting thin walls of their dark corner and they found themselves stranded on starvation's shoals. The word "strike" was incomprehensible to Mae. To her an employer was a benefactor who in exchange for a day's work made possible slow migration to the magnetic East—the world of Mode awaiting Lucy. She agreed with her employer who said if he didn't give work how could the ungrateful strikers live. Imagine the strike leader saying if they didn't work how could the employers make money! How could you work without an employer? She didn't mind the long hours. She resented the strikers as plotters against Lucy's present and future. Food became scarcer in their corner, and there was no money for ballet lessons. The strikers, Mae explained to Lucy, hungry all the time now, were a menace called Bolsheviki. Mae often had been obliged to get a new job when one of her employers, at a moment's notice, ceased his benefactions—but what bewildered her now was the changes in times. What caused "hard times"—a change which made a job, any job, impossible to find?

To Lucy this crisis was signal for change. What did she care about 26