clearly as impossible as taking him home to Boston, commandeering the midtown studio apartment of a Wellesley classmate now painting in Fiesole, and having him dance for Raymond Figente, who was known to go in for protégés, Mrs. Custerd was unable to think of another thing to present her idol to the American public. Ranna even had had to remind her that the spirit required not only housing but sustenance before she thought to open an account for him at a Fifth Avenue bank which had such pretty wallpaper—and a Congregational God-only-knows-what extravagances New York might have witnessed if Mrs. Custerd's son and daughter-in-law had not stepped in to rescue their inheritance.
Thus it was, with his doting dotaged patroness all but incarcerated in Marblehead, that Ranna, while assured for the time being of his Italianate apartment, was becoming uneasy about his future in America. With the help of Alveg Dahl, the painter, there were a few women of a certain age eager to pay for instruction in the mysteries of the East. Yogi words, and the religious positions of lovemaking as illustrated by him from the sacred writings of the Kamasutra of Vatsayama, had an open sesame effect.
But the golden Lucy Claudel was in a different category. She was worth the exertion of teaching the dance of the East as prelude to that other dance so constantly in his thought since first seeing her. And so, in preparation for her visit, he bestirred himself and draped staircase, balcony, carven furniture, and couch with mirror-twinkling India silks from his trunk, and put on a stiff white satin gold-braided robe, deciding against incense as too obvious, as she was of the theatre.
Hearing staccato steps on the mosaic hall floor, he went quickly to pour boiling water on the tea and set the tray on a tabouret.
She came in wrapped in silver karacul on grey suede sandals cross-laced to above her flesh-silk ankles. Her now familiar musky scent enveloped him.
"Br-r-r, winter's coming but it's nice and warm here," she said, relinquishing her coat, and turning, a spray of chiffon shell tints washed around her knees.
"I am so pleased you did not forget."
"I'm only fifteen minutes late, and that's prompt for me," she said, her all-seeing eyes taking in the mustard-yellow, pomegranate, and robin's-egg-blue silks. From them hundreds of imbedded mirror fragments winked like so many opera glasses at the theatre.
