She didn't want him coming to Aunt Mabel's and having to answer her nosy questions. And Vida hanging around for their usual Sunday afternoon walk. "I'll meet you here."
Her eyes lightened to May-sky blue. It was the nicest date she'd ever had to look forward to. Even better than the lunch at the Brown Palace with Miss Shaver …
Lucy went to dress. The basket of hepaticas was on a stump of a table amid a forest of chair spokes, easels and brushes.
Perhaps, thought Clem, the florist will have some left to take to Ma. She'll be hurt if I'm not home for Sunday dinner.
In Vienna, broad steps to the Albertina Museum led to a small drawing of violets by Albrecht Dürer. Dürer sure drew everything in sight. Lucky Dürer to have lived before the age when a painter had to be preoccupied with geometries. The small flowers' deep green fat heart leaves had not looked particularly impressive, yet there they were, unabashedly violets and reproduced in books and postcards, immortally. To get to the florist's before closing meant stopping work now and he felt like working, Ma probably would like a little drawing of hepaticas just as well. A pencil drawing with a wash of color on that Italian paper. That sure w'as a nice little shop in Venice near the Rezanico where he'd bought the Fabriano paper, the sort Diirer might have used. Anything would look good on such paper.
Lucy leaned over his shoulder as he drew. "I love that. How pretty the blue is on the paper. So nice and wet."
It is, he thought wryly, her first wholehearted approval of work by me. Not that she's a judge. Still, if she likes it Ma will too. "It's for my mother."
"I bet she'll be tickled. It's going to look awfully cute framed. Can I have my flowers now to take home?"
He was inordinately pleased as she went off. He found a small frame that would do by adding a narrow mat and for once went home unafraid to meet his mother's fond perplexed gaze.
On the streetcar people smiled at the hepaticas. The woman next to Lucy leaned over to smell them and the faded violets on her hat flopped over.
My goodness, flowers make people awfully friendly. I wonder if they'd make Aunt Mabel cheerful?
She nodded acknowledgment of the friendly glances and, cross-
