Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/75

 shame. She could not wait until, after her next bath, she went naked to ask her mother a trumped-up question.

"What do you mean by walking around without a stitch on, aren't you ashamed of yourself!" screeched outraged Mrs. Bertrand, with the result that Vida wept and sulked the rest of the day.

After the petits battements came grands battements and then changements—which set the door rattling. The Hand of Fate rapped three times. Aunt Mabel's voice screamed, "What's going on in there?"

"Nothing, I'm just practicing," Lucy said meekly.

"Well, you just get out here and practice with a dustcloth and dishpan while I'm at the store," blared Aunt Mabel.

Lucy waited until she heard the back screen door slam and then scrambled into her clothes, unwound the curlers, and brushed the ringlets around her finger. In record time she flipped the dustcloth, washed the dishes, made their bed, and put on high-heeled slippers. She wanted to be out of the house before her aunt returned. She never could practice while Aunt Mabel was home, and there was a whole day to fill.

"I think," she said to the thirty-five cents as she slid them into a cheap white purse, "I think I'll go shopping."

At the corner of Nebraska and Venner stood the giant dressing room of a fairy princess, Lapworth's Department Store.

"I'm looking," she said with dignity, "for something in perfume." The handmaiden at the vast toilet table shoved a pencil into her hair and stood at attention, a glint of recognition in her eyes. Lovingly Lucy caressed crystal phials of colored scents, lifting them gently to her nose after a little shake to expel the sweet vapors. The keeper of the flasks followed her in silence. A woman stood waiting farther along.

"You can wait on her first, I'm in no hurry," Lucy said with a gracious smile.

Reluctantly the saleswoman left and Lucy made for the strategic target of her mission, a row of small open bottles in a wooden rack. A wary eye for the opportune instant and a quick touch from each stopper to ears, nostrils, neck, cheek, and wrists, and as a dividend—the saleswoman leaving to collect change—Lucy was showered from the netted bulb atomizer by a mist of Houbigant's Quelques Fleurs. Rh