poser named Alfred Vent read to her from Gertrude Stein. You know, 'a rose is a rose is a rose.' He's writing music to it."
"Well," said Vermillion, "that's part of a point in the use of language Stein is making, and there's a lot more to Stein than that line. She can't be held responsible for your dancer friend any more than for one of a group of batlike dancers I saw in Berlin who go in for yo-ho-to-ho without a bottle of rum. This one sat on the stage and moved around on her buttocks, a deep-seated emotional manifestation which appeals to many Germans. She also spun around interminably in another item appropriately titled 'Monotony.' Perhaps Ilona is a disciple."
"That is very hard to do," Lucy stated flatly, thinking of fouettés, annoyed at them for laughing at the art of the dance.
"Ilona is a disciple of that," Vida said eagerly to the kind of young man she had wanted to meet, artist and handsome too, in the manner of Renaissance young men in the Metropolitan. "Ilona has been studying a book about that German dance. She says her mission is to unite all schools to make a pure American dance. She says that just as America is the melting pot of different nationalities, it should be of the arts, especially of the dance because the dance is the mother of the arts. And she feels 'the Call' to unite the dance because she was born on the Great Divide."
This report did not have the hilarious effect Vida expected as everyone seemed to have wearied of the subject and Lucy, who could not keep her mind on any impersonal subject more than a few minutes, was unscrupulously distracting Vermillion's attention by examining the palm of his hand.
Lucy traced the lines with a naughty forefinger. "You have very strong lines for such a soft palm. I learned to read palms from a fortuneteller who comes backstage every week but I don't believe that stuff. Now some of the girls at the show are being psychoanalyzed, and one of them is psychoanalyzing me. I'll psychoanalyze you. What did you dream last night?"
"I had a poet friend who told his dream to his girl and she left him because she didn't want to be his mother," Vermillion said, her cool hand making him feel uncomfortably warm, and to end this trend of questioning.
"You're a coward," Lucy said, releasing him with a tap.
"Women's makeup and dress nowadays resembles that of the early Egyptians," broke in Figente, made fidgety by the overtones of this boy-girl exchange.
