Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/87

 and seized on it as a heaven-sent sign of escape from his mother's reproachfully questioning eyes.

The first thing he did was to have the Victorian excrescences on door and windows chiseled off, bricks cleaned to their original red, the window frames painted chrome yellow and the door ultramarine blue: primary colors in defiance of the Bisons in their granite-rough building across the street. The Bisons in their fortress of two joined grey stone residences eyed 410 suspiciously and debated having it raided as a Bolsheviki hangout. That Brush feller even had a red beard and more yet just had come from Paris France. Specific examples of French rottenness were titillatingly related by several younger Bisons, recently returned from the war, who had made impersonally scientific investigations in certain Paris houses where women did anything you wanted for money. American women, like at Mona's, wouldn't do those things. "That's all those Frenchies are interested in, money," said Martin L. (short for Luther) Schultz to his shocked brother Bisons.

On the afternoon when the house painters were finished Clem, entangled as usual in the simultaneous wish to be approved as regular and delight in the attention his irregularity of habiliment produced, leaned back on his cane, made a peephole of his right hand, and examined through it the pictorial possibilities of Brick Street, which he dismissed with a theatrically contemptuous shrug, conscious that across the street in the Bison doorway stood Councilman Lauter glaring in openmouthed outrage.

"Harya, Councilman," Clem called over with oblivious affability, and entered past the ultramarine door, the opening of which set off a voice as if part of a cuckoo clock.

Peering into the room to the left he saw on a dilapidated black leather couch a curled tomcat figure of a young man, fat haunched, neckless it seemed, his small flat-topped head with pointed protruding ears facing the door with unblinking grey eyes.

Clem grinned. "Hello, Shakespeare!"

Semanter Klug, Semy to friends, unfolded his long-torsoed thick-limbed body and smoothed his dark sleek hair to each side of its center part with a fleshy palm.

"It's Whitman." His pleasant voice had a timbre of triumph Rh