206
PARTISAN REVIEW
"You could go to a progressive college." Both of them blinked
in
the
sudden darkness.
"I don't want to go to any school. I hate it. Besides, if I went
away I couldn't go to the galleries," Gretchen flashed at him. It quite
settled
him
for the moment. He was left with the choice of saying
nothing or arguing with her. For the present he said nothing and this
made poor Gretchen feel foolish. Then Simeon and Sheila came up
behind them, and Gretchen's foolish feeling dissolved into a com–
panionable smile.
First they all went to the Sienese rooms, where the two theo–
sophists found their favorite pictures and made the proper obeisances.
Then after a while all four of them sat down in another room. They
stayed upstairs for an hour or more, discussing the new arrangements
and whether that red brocade was a good color. It was when they
were looking at the Daddi, of St. Catherine's marriage, and Sheila
was trying to explain symbolic marriage to Melvin-it was then that
Gretchen thought of the ankh again. She spoke of it to Sheila who
insisted that they all go down to see it. Melvin did not know what
the ankh was, but the two girls promised that it was worth seeing,
so they led the way down to the Egyptian rooms, full of elaborate
girlish mystery.
Finally, they found it, the enchanting blue faience object. Sheila
and Gretchen stood in front of the glass case, summoning their old
attitudes of reverence. The ankh was another symbol of their friend–
ship. They had come upon it one day and it seemed to mean every–
thing-this strange cross made thousands of years ago by people who
had enslaved their ancestors. But they never thought of that. For
them the ankh was life and immortality and many other things,
much more than life,
all
the meanings thick and never articulated,
but expressed in the brilliant bluish-green. There it was. Sheila had
made ankh pendants for each of them, Gretchen put the ankh at the
bottom of
all
her pictures, like Whistler's butterfly, and Sheila even
embroidered the ankh on handkerchiefs. She also had gotten some
clay and made a little ankh which she painted blue. It occupied a
place of honor on her bookshelf and it never failed to move them.
"Ah, yes," Simeon said, as if recognizing something familiar.
"The old Egyptian symbol for life." He lived at International House
and could be expected to know such things.
