"Look, Semy, I could go if we took Mother. Wouldn't it be fun if mother and Clem came with us?"
Ah, she regarded Clem as an old man.
In the end, with Semy sulky because of Lucy's manipulations, it was decided that she, her mother and himself would be Clem's guests at the Bohemian Cellar.
From an old evening dress, discarded by a rich client of the Bittner Sisters, Mae made Lucy an outfit for the occasion. The first sight of ten-minute-late Lucy at the entrance of the smoky beery room unsettled its patrons.
She entered, slender as a fashion plate, wrapped in a night-blue velvet coat from chin to ankles, her extravagant eyes searching out Clem and Semy from under a large same-blue velvet hat with a small pair of scarlet wings in flight. Beside her was shadowy woolen unfeathered Mae. Clem, in tumult, blinked. How was I to know from school clothes and dance costume she isn't a child?
The room stopped its buzzing and openmouthed watched the strangers go to the table of the painter fellow and the guy from the Husker-Sun. Some chicken! O boy!
A table of four home for the week end from the "U" at Lincoln ogled. Who is she? "I'll find out, that guy works for my dad," offered Herold Lauter.
"Your daughter is wonderful to paint," Clem told Mae. A fine mother. Sweet. Nice-looking, too.
Lucy smiled affectionately because he was being so nice to Mother. Mae nodded serenely, sipped near beer politely, and ate with her best company manners. Always put down your knife across your plate when you are finished cutting. She was happily content that the artist, such a nice gentleman, appreciated Pussy. Semy was the man with the tickets.
Semy was sullen. Ruth had wept because he had said two weeks ago he would take her to see those Omaha dancers. Now Lucy laughed and joked with old Clem while her pouter-pigeon mother preened. And they all ignored him.
A juvenile cock's crow sideswiped their table and Clem, halting his first carefree bantering in years, glanced at the raucous college boys' table behind theirs. "Isn't that Lauter's son?" he asked Semy.
"Yes, Herold. A nitwit." Semy drained the imitation rathskeller mug and set it on the planked table with a dictatorial thump. "Let's go"
"I haven't finished my ice cream," said Lucy.
