Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/78

 crazy-quilt patches but she always turned over those pages because she neither knew nor cared what those pictures meant.

She saw the figure seemed to be in ballet pose but standing in air instead of firmly on the sturdy toe of a ballerina's slipper. She opened her mouth and retrieved a crumb from her cheek with a wipe of her pink tongue. The colors were exciting but no dancer could stand that way. And the arms! "Such port de bras," she criticized with a tsk of her now free tongue.

A shadow islanded her and the painting from the burning August sun. She glanced at the reflection in the window to see who was standing behind her. A tall brown gingerbread man leaned over her and she turned to see an orange glow which was a short pointed beard. The small eyes were shaded by heavy bristles like the brushes in the window. Rough tweeds as unfamiliar as the dark blue tarn on his head labeled him a foreigner. A light tap of pleasure at the base of her throat heralded adventure.

The tall figure straightened as she turned and, amazed, she saw he had been leaning on a queer crooked umbrella-handle stick.

"How do you like it?"

Why, this strange man's voice was just like Congress and much higher and gentler than she expected because only Bolsheviki wore beards. Except old grey men.

"Well, I guess it's all right—but whoever made it didn't know much about ballet," she answered guardedly.

Clem Brash felt the patronizing pat he had begun to bestow on a beautiful child dissolve. Annoyance took the place of indulgent complacence. A complacence recently achieved after months of gnawing self-doubting to salve with reassurance the aesthetic wound received in France, a wound more painful than his limp, souvenir of Verdun.

At twenty-seven Clem Brash felt finished. Seven long years ago, in 1913, he had been a methodical art student in New York accepting without question Monet's purple shadows as these filtered through the patter of the local teachers. Then suddenly he found himself a revolutionary against everything in previous art forms. A momentous event in art history now known as the Armory Show startled New York, exposing the latest forms in European painting, principally French. It no longer mattered if one couldn't equal the old-fashioned impressionists, or old-hat old Masters. The new paintings, with their whorls and cones and—things, gave Clem pause. By themselves they would not have converted him to the new aesthetic 66