now hung in the center of Mrs. Brush's parlor, was hard and static. Mrs. Brush had said wistfully, "Of course, as Clem says, this painting is more important, but I always loved the first one." It had been best not to mention that the first "Hepaticas" had come back in a strange fashion to Lucy, who had been a collaborator in its inception. She must tell Clem he was the boast of Congress and that at Cheever's his name was on the lips of painters springing up like mushrooms; that Henkel and Larson were aping his work with plagiaristic precision; that the Widow Doremus was painting too to prove that women could be artists and had converted the walls of her knickknack shop into an art gallery.
The trip on the cheapest train seemed endless and as it plunged into the Pennsylvania Station tunnel she was shaking with tension. There had been no invitation from Lucy to stay with her so she went to a nearby YWCA. The dreary cubicle seemed more a cell in a reformatory for wayward girls than a home for the homeless.
She telephoned but Lucy was not in, not surprising as it was the middle of the afternoon. She put on the clothes Mae had made for her and, as she walked to the Jason to leave a note, it suddenly struck her as odd that Lucy should be at a shabby hotel off Broadway. She left the note with a sharpfaced desk clerk and, with foreboding, telephoned Figente to inquire about her.
"He would like you to come right down," relayed Denis.
She was horrified to see Figente so shrunken, his yellow jowls swung as he came to greet her with an attempt at his former polite insolence. "And how were the provinces?" he asked, his clammy hand sliding through hers.
"I won't bore you with details," she said, trying to sound offhand. She could not relate to one so dreadfully sick the horrors of her first encounter with death in the shaded parlor at home. Home that never seemed home. Or tell of nightmares when Ma's eyes so like Tina's accused from the grave a selfish undutiful daughter.
"Being thin becomes you," he said. "Where are you staying?"
He seemed over-glad to have company. It wasn't like Figente to pay compliments. At least, not to her. "I'm at the YWCA tonight but I'll look for a place tomorrow. I haven't even seen Lucy yet. I left word at the Jason."
"The Jason? Where's that?"
"You mean you haven't seen her recently?"
"Not for months, but then I'm just back from Newport for a week before moving on to Palm Beach. I haven't been quite up to
