Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/74

 felt raised. Her head pressed back onto its axis and her arms curved downward, hands again in stilted position, now turned inward as though holding flowers to hide the pink lotus whose form flowed to separate the thighs from her flat little belly. A gesture of unintended modesty.

Then, slowly, she raised a toe-pointed leg straight back like a draughtsman's compass, her throat tensing under the strain as her arms rose to the side for balance. Incredulity brushed her face and she swung the leg forward to rest the foot on the bureau. Grasping its ankle in both hands she pulled herself forward to touch her temple to her knee. She could not make it.

It had been so easy four months ago at dancing school. Her mouth opened in consternation. She sat down, legs apart, hands on knees, body forward to inspect the reason for this development. Her lips pursed at the indignity her growing curving body had played on her. I wonder, she thought with unusual morbidity, if I'm too old to be a ballet dancer. Maybe I'll have to be just an interpretive Greek dancer.

Lucy's knowledge of the Greeks was limited to draperies interpretive dancers wore at Miss Klemper's. She did not think of the Greeks long. A minute later she jumped up and rummaged about until she found her ballet slippers.

"Ouch," she squealed, for she had grown out of the slippers. She hobbled about for a time, adjusting herself to their smallness. Then humming lightly a tune remembered from her practice, she began a series of petits battements. She felt gay and, looking through the screened window, saw Vida coming along the passage between the two houses.

Vida glanced up automatically as always in hope of seeing Lucy or hearing her. It happened rarely but when it did was invariably in the nature of a new revelation. One day Lucy's high matter-of-fact voice had floated softly out carrying on its wings "Mother, don't you think I ought to wear a brassiere"—she had been studying Mode—and Vida had fled conscious for the first time of her own breasts.

Today Lucy called to her. "Hello, Vida—look, I'm practicing," and held her leg up.

Vida, eager for any crumb of attention from her idol, seeing her stand so indifferent to nakedness was plunged into despondent jealousy because she could not achieve so glorified a state, and it became her ambition to stand naked before someone without dying of 62