Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/380

 for a brassière, and that long, long black hair. She looked beautiful. Irwin, and some of the boys who think girls should be boys, wavered, I thought. Ilona objected violently saying Demora was being vulgar and exploiting her body. The latter objection bewildered Demora. It was up to Ranna, to whose group the Amazon belongs, to mollify our priestess. Of course, Ilona doesn't know yet that Demora's only addition to the gold trunks will be a string of beads.

Ranna will wear his native costume and is using his Hindu silks and saris for his ballet. Lucy will wear a silver sari for their duet.

The Laurencin ballet costumes are wisps of chiffon accented where necessary for line with crisp tarlatan, giving a flowery unity to the movements of Lucy's girls. Their makeup is a cream foundation, exaggerated black eyes and round rose lips, each face fixed as a planet in a heavenly headdress of unnatural pinks, greens, and mauves festooned with pearls and plumed with beckoning ostrich feathers. Each figure has a gauze scarf, a black-ribbon neck bow, or a streamer, to be woven together in related arabesques of movement.

Lucy will wear forget-me-not blue, lemon-yellow and orchid tarlatan, very short, and a flesh tulle scarf, her wheat-hued hair fastened with a nosegay at the top of her head, and a narrow black ribbon round her throat.

April 19, 1925.

I keep noticing the characteristic dual pattern of feminine behavior, similar to Lucy's and, to a more limited extent, my own. Especially the artificial roles expected of women by men but which bewilder women, even when they feel pleasure in lovemaking. I mean the masculine symbols of language, fetishes, etc. These are illustrated in the erotic drawings men make for other men which Figente has a collection of—as though there were an insufficiency in women as women per se. (I must try to avoid using "per se"—Vermillion dislikes that phrase.) Those drawings certainly aren't made to excite women. What I am trying to say is that women behave as men want them to in those drawings, but the things they are asked to do and say means nothing to them as lovemaking. Lucy always tells the truth about such things, and I know it was true for me. Demora, 368