Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/44

 Lucy came and sat next to her.

"Don't you think I ought to put on my makeup?"

"Wait, dear, we'd better not get in the way."

They sat, as at a performance, learning how rich people acted.

Years later—nine o'clock—Mr. Brady arrived with the four musicians and a great shout went up for a one-step.

Lucy, eager to begin, rushed to speak to Mr. Brady, but the way he expressionlessly said "later, later" it seemed as if he didn't recollect her part in the program. Her unaccustomed feeling of frustration returned sickeningly as she realized she was not the star of the celebration.

She stood watching the dancers. Listening to the music, punctuated by drums, cowbells and all the other percussive paraphernalia of the jazz drummer, she wanted to dance too. Not the staccato propulsion of the "Doll Dance" which, as she observed the swaying pairs, seemed a classroom exercise taught by Miss Klemper, an old maid. She wanted to dance the long free step and whirl of the one-step.

Ballroom dancing is more fun than ballet, she thought. Maybe I ought to be a ballroom dancer like Irene Castle. It's easier too. These women are terrible dancers. What fat behinds. I wonder if it's all right to smile at one of the men so he will ask me to dance?

She scanned the possibilities and decided the men were as terrible as their women partners.

The thin, flashy drummer, pounding everything in sight, must have been watching her for, as their eyes met, they laughed as at a secret joke and she made a small movement with her shoulders to show appreciation of his playing.

He's crazy, she thought approvingly, and better looking then Frank or Freddie, and older too, a man.

For the first time that evening she felt comfortable. The drummer, all the musicians, were from a different world, the theatre world she belonged to too, a much more exciting world than that of these Bisons.

Unaware of this excommunication, the bumping zigzagging Bisons jerked to the syncopation, oblivious of Lucy's critical eye, intent on excitation rarely experienced in connubial encounters. Clumsy gyrations which, in fifteen years, would resolve into simple statement of theme in the lascivious rhumba. But now, otherwise circumspect mothers and grandmothers performed, as their critic fascinatedly 32