Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/39

 those old Bolsheviki with long beards and bombs? She had planned all along to work this summer, before school started again. Wasn't she thirteen and grown up? She was going to help tired Mother who worked so hard and never had any fun.

With each technical advance at Miss Klemper's she viewed the dancers at the Empire in new perspective. The chorus line, foremost last year in her vision, now faded into a mass background for the specialty dancers, those comets who, only a year ago, were too remote for emulation. One day she said to herself in surprise as she watched—"Why, I can do more than the chorus and some of what the soloists do."

One afternoon while Mae was out looking for work, Lucy, in her best dress, high-heeled slippers, and patent leather belt pulled tight, went to call on Mr. Brady, manager of the Empire Theatre.

"Walk across the room and pick up your skirt," said the big potbellied man.

Lucy hesitated and then lifted her dress slowly. She couldn't understand why she felt so afraid as this fat man's beady eyes seemed to suck in—they were such sticky eyes—her legs. How else could he see her legs, Lucy reassured herself. My goodness, it's lucky I've my best panties on.

Then the man said, "Higher, higher."

Suddenly Lucy wasn't afraid. Why he's just like Frank!

"How old are you?"

Lucy dropped her skirt and said, "Seventeen."

Mr. Brady said nothing but just looked.

"Well—going on."

He smiled, thinking, what a looker, and said, "Let's see what you can do."

With a wall of photographs of luminaries as background, she kicked off her slippers and broke into a routine of her accomplishments, as though she, with fixed smile, and he, with unsmiling sticky eyes, were adversaries. Finished, she pulled down her dress, adjusted her belt, and awaited his comment. He tapped a pencil which had been doodling on an engagement calendar. She eyed him inquiringly in the first wait of her life, a frightening, unfamiliar feeling to a hitherto confident Lucy. The world in the potbellied beady-eyed form of Mr. Brady had caught up with her.

"You're okay, girlie, but you need experience." Rh