Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/70

 since having concluded from personal experience that in a woman outward appearance was more important than anything.

Mae handed Lucy the nightly glass of milk. Mode said hair should be brushed 100 strokes every night. Ninety-nine, one hundred. Mae noted with satisfaction as she finished only one or two shining strands in the brush, and set to work to bind Lucy's sleek gilt curls with rags. Next week the roots would need retouching.

The lavender handkerchief shading the dangling bulb had been Mae's gesture to make their room—except that here the bed was golden oak instead of bug-proof white enamel—a replica of their rooms in roominghouses. Home. Though this house had been Mae's home before marriage there was an appearance of impermanence in this shadowed room. Here the two spent the hours just as tentatively as in roominghouses. Lucy sprawled on the bed under which lay their two suitcases conveniently at hand for any sudden change in plans, voluntary or involuntary. Their clothes hung from hangers on hooks on the door, covered neatly, like costumes in a theatre dressing room, with the same floral cretonne used in the Denver roominghouse. In the bottom drawer of the bird's-eye maple dresser lay unseasonable garments; in the next two, underwear and night clothes. The remaining two drawers contained sewing materials, ribbons, and whatever implements to accentuate beauty were not strewn on top. It had taken a while to get used to so much drawer space; in roominghouses one drawer had to be reserved for food. Utensils, and the always forbidden small gas plate, had been kept locked in a suitcase away from prying landladies. But now the surreptitious meals seemed sweet in remembrance as they faced the grudging plenty of Aunt Mabel's immaculate table where Lucy ate sparingly despite her hunger while wondering what made her aunt so mean.

Inherently unable to conform to Aunt Mabel's Twelfth Street code of decency, they were both nervous from the constant strain of warding off her continually voiced dire threat of eviction. It would be calamitous, Mae thought, if Mabel actually did put them out before they had recouped sufficiently to continue with plans for Lucy. Indeed they already had experienced a frightening taste of what it was like to arrive home at eleven o'clock and find the door barricaded. But Mae had been undaunted. She had lifted Lucy up to pry open their bedroom window, hoisted herself up, and in the morning acted as if the door had not been bolted. Worms of defeat bored at Mabel's innards. She began to devise plans to rid herself 58