fouettés. "And the entrechats! Remember, always on the way down—never begin on the way up!" he admonished.
Even so, with all this criticism, she knew it was high praise.
To her surprise Lucy saw, as Master and Madame left, Tessie standing with Semy.
"You were divine, dear—and that ballet costume was sweet," Tessie burbled, and turned toward the young man who was something important at Biggens Pictures. "It reminded me," she said to Semy, "of a shepherdess dress I wore in my first London show. I was only sixteen and so nervous. I wore a sweet white taffeta with little roses and forget-me-nots—it looped up with ribbons to show a beautiful satin underskirt just the color of my hair. And right in the crevice of the bodice was a little forget-me-not nosegay. I remember Gerald du Maurier saying I looked good enough to eat, and I blushed because I was so shy."
A guying laugh broke in and Lucy saw it was Rosie, one of the girls who had been in a show with Tessie.
"Tessie always has to top every compliment with one to herself," Rosie said to Vida.
Vida smiled mechanically. Spying a free chair she went to sit for the first time all day except for the taxi. She felt her heavy body sink onto the seat and was grateful for the isolation of a wall of standing people.
"You little devil! Why are you hiding?" a known voice said in her ear and, quaking, she saw Rad Welford. Mistaking her flush for that bashfulness that was one of the things that had excited him, he pressed her hand. "Darling, I've missed you—Let's go somewhere and talk."
He was like, Vida thought, the baggy pants comic of the Houston Street Burlesque Theatre, attended by the literati and painters, who, hitching up his pants, said to the chorus girl, "Darlink, let's us go somewheres where we take our shoes off—and talk."
"No, and Rad, I don't miss you," she said, feeling a flood of relief at her hard new courage. The dreaded meeting was easy. She looked almost dispassionately at the smooth, small-featured face, poreless boyish skin, smooth taffy hair, and moist full lips, and wondered what had possessed her to permit him to do that to her body.
He searched her face for some clew as to how she thought he had failed, saw it was useless to persist and, baffled, left abruptly for someone across town more accommodating at a price.
***
