"Thanks for playing for me, Charlie," she said, "you sure play swell—see you again—I have to go now." And she ran off hastily to the lunch at Weber's soda fountain Mae had prescribed. An egg sandwich and a chocolate malted.
After lunch she was tired. Venner Street was a letdown from the imagined bright lights of Broadway and she went to the ladies' room of Delmar's Department Store to rest and then to the pattern counter to look at all the latest pattern books. A nickel was left out of her thirty-five when she went to the five and ten, everything she wanted was much too expensive. It would have been nice to buy a present for Mother but there was nothing but a celluloid butterfly pin for five cents. She wanted to see Mae, the whole day without her dragged, and she started off to Bittner Sisters.
Chapter 7
ARTIST AND MODEL
Turning into the vestibule which led up to Bittner Sisters she saw in the window of Cheever's Store a canary-yellow rectangle on which was a strange sort of human bird in red, purple, green, and blue—a picture without a frame on a three-legged stand.
She never before had stopped in front of this store window, usually displaying uninteresting things, large sheets of paper, colored pencils, brushes, little tin cups or wooden boxes, and books. Nothing to wear. But this bright yellow picture had pretty colors, reminding her of something—Mode?—and something else. What could it be?
Her eyes widened to take it in. It was a picture of a bird figure. Man or woman? Slowly the blades and patches of color diffused into a photograph on the wall of Miss Klemper's studio in Denver. She felt a surge of warm familiarity and put her face close to the glass to see better. Miss Kleinper had said it was the photograph of a Russian ballet dancer. Mother said Russians were Bolsheviki who wore beards and went on strike and that was why the factory closed down. In Mode there were pictures of all sorts of colored and
