Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/84

 was nice. If it was true they could leave Aunt Mabel's with all that money he would pay her.

"My ballet dress is light blue with sequins all down here, and rosebuds."

"Any kind of a costume is all right."

I guess he doesn't know anything about dancing to say a silly thing like that. I should worry. A half dollar an hour! Just for standing!

"Let's say tomorrow afternoon at my studio—410 Brick—two o'clock?"

As quick as all that, and in Congress too! The light high disappearing scale of her voice disturbed and excited him long after she ran up the stairs to the Bittner Sisters' sewing rooms where she told him her mother was.

As Clem left Cheever's, St. Cecilia's bells struck the three quarter. Dismay at being late for six o'clock supper erased the years since childhood when tardiness meant punishment. Queer how he couldn't shake the feeling he must be on time at home. In Paris at vesper bells he'd be blending with a second Pernod into the green-yellow twilight. He was out of breath after his dash for the streetcar and, settling into one of the few remaining seats, felt the hostile inquiring stare of the passengers. The little-boy feeling passed and he sat looking straight ahead secretly pleased at the attention his beret, beard, and Windsor tie attracted. After all, in Paris artists wore clothes, and beards, which disclosed their identity.

The one-eyed cupola of a two-storied brick house watched him descend a block from home. Front rooms and upstairs were dark in the houses on Pawnee Street but kitchens and dining rooms glowed. A little girl in a red dress stopped roller skating to observe Clem from across the street, and a man who had known him since childhood muttered a noncommittal "Evenin', Clem." A neighbor's collie, sniffing at his heels, followed him to the back door where, in the kitchen, he was greeted by his mother ladling apple sauce into a glass dish and the pungent odor of roast pork.

He hung his cane and beret on a hook next to the kitchen door, and gave his mother a pat on the back in clumsy affection. Her voice was sweet sour, like her homemade preserves.

"You're just in time to run down to the cellar for a jar of green tomato pickles, or maybe you'd rather have mustard pickles."

Mrs. Brush thought she ought not to have said run because of his leg but that blue tarn and red beard determined her not to see 72