Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/96

 "No, no, just the costume. Otherwise just as you are."

Artists are funny. It was more like when Mother took her to have her picture taken than at the Bison Hall.

"Now," said Clem, arranging the portieres so the platform was clear, "take the pose like the painting you saw yesterday."

Lucy rolled up on her toes, held it an instant, and wobbled. "Well," she explained, "I can't stand still this way long, I'd have to go into the next step."

Clem frowned. "Is there any pose you can hold?"

"Oh sure. I can stand like this, or this, or this, or this. I can hold any of the five positions."

"Let's see the one before the last with your one leg forward, and one arm up and one down. Can you hold that?"

"You mean the fourth position. I can hold this."

She felt good. This was something like Miss Klemper's studio. A studio was a nicer place to study in than in some old schoolroom where Miss Shaver or some boy was always wanting to kiss you.

Clem was in a fever of work. The pose was like—the sculptured ballerinas of Degas. Yet there was a difference. Hers was not the resilent exercised line of a Degas dancer. How much had been fact, how much fancy, in Degas's perception? He picked up a stick of charcoal but uncertainty paralyzed him. The five fingers of his stiff hand pointed down many different roads of approach. His eyes kept wandering back to her face. Cobalt eyes, lemon cadmium hair with a tinge of white and ochre. Now that he saw her emerging from the carnation skirt she was no fragile Laurencin convalescent, but living Flora within reach. She was no lesser copy of museum beauties, the modest eyes of Botticelli's maidens never stared at the world so frankly. The stalk of the long white throat rose straight from its cup between the gentle curve of the shoulders, but a line of tarlatan surf washed tantalizingly over the high twin dunes. If only he could get her to pose nude. His eyes drew the long gradual curve of her legs. Too much tarlatan stuff where the legs joined the body. He rearranged a fold in the portiere he had no intention of drawing, a pretense to kill time while he tried to formulate the feel of his first line. He whistled happily under his breath and Lucy glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, but he didn't seem to be looking at her that way.

"If you get tired, rest." His voice was preoccupied as he seated himself in front of a board on which was thumbtacked a sheet of 84