Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/81

. But what? He burned with impotent jealousy, and pushed a pigeon aside with his cane. Seven years since he had left New York, and nothing to show. Perhaps in New York he could achieve that release which came to others. Why couldn't he be recognized like—Picasso. I can paint a Picasso.

He returned to New York wearing, not the uniform of the war he had fought bravely, but the insignia of the recognizable artist, beard and beret. An insignia which now at dark moments seemed more impossible to deserve than on that day when, having won first prize in a high school poster contest, the butcher, the baker and, best of all, the girls had said: "Well, Clem, see you're quite an artist."

There was no such acclamation from this girl for the figure he had painted in memory of heated roaring nights at the Russian Ballet in Paris. He had thought it stood up pretty well to the Leon Bakst drawings he had tried to emulate. And now here even in Congress, a provincial vacuum if ever there was one, a chit like a Hellenistic Tanagra come to life made him feel again that disquiet from which he had fled, first in Paris, then in New York, where they knew as much as he did about cubism and futurism, and could paint a Cezanne or Picasso, and did.

The lengthening afternoon shadows molded the blue drape of Lucy's dress against her body. Pencil line with watercolor wash.

"So you know all about dancing, do you?" He tried to make his voice casual, and was annoyed to hear it pitch high.

Why should the man sound so cross? You'd think he made the picture. Lucy laughed. The deference she first had felt melted. He didn't seem strange any more, his voice wasn't what she expected from so big a man. She looked at him, could not catch his eye. Some people were like that, they never looked at you when talking.

"Well, you see in ballet there is a flat place on the toe and you stand on it."

He hoped his reply would answer her, an answer learned in Paris. "Maybe in this case the artist wanted to give a certain effect, as though she—the ballet dancer—is a bird."

Lucy was unimpressed. "Well, I keep thinking she'll break her toe. I'd like it better if it was more right—real. I don't even see how she could dance in that costume—I couldn't."

Clem, irritated, opened his mouth to defend himself but doubt tied his tongue. Perhaps she was right. He didn't know how a dancer Rh