Page 72 - Universal

trying to make it easier for Nancy Lee to achieve learning than it had been for them.
They would be very happy when they heard of the award to their daughter—yet Nancy

did not tell them. To surprise them would be better. Besides, there had been a promise.
Casually, one day, Miss Dietrich asked Nancy Lee what color frame she thought would

be best on her picture. That had been the first inkling.

“Blue,” Nancy Lee said. Although the picture had been entered
in the Artist Club contest a month ago, Nancy Lee did not
What you Think?ou Think?
hesitate in her choice of a color for the possible frame since What y
she could still see her picture clearly in her mind’s eye—for Who were Nancy’s
that picture waiting for the blue frame had come out of parents ?
her soul, her own life, and had bloomed into miraculous

being with Miss Dietrich’s help. It was, she knew, the best
watercolor she had painted in her four years as a high-school
art student, and she was glad she had made something Miss Dietrich liked well enough
to permit her to enter in the contest before she graduated.

It was not a modernistic picture in the sense that you had to look at it a long time to
understand what it meant. It was just a simple scene in the city park on a spring day

with the trees still leaflessly lacy against the sky, the new grass fresh and green, a flag
on a tall pole in the center, children playing, and an old Negro woman sitting on a
bench with her head turned. A lot for one picture, to be sure, but it was not there in
heavy and final detail like a calendar. Its charm was that everything was light and airy,

happy like spring, with a lot of blue sky, paper-white clouds, and air showing through.
You could tell that the old Negro woman was looking at the flag, and that the flag was
proud in the spring breeze, and that the breeze helped to make the children’s dresses
billow as they played.

Miss Dietrich had taught Nancy Lee how to paint spring, people, and a breeze on what
was only a plain white piece of paper from the supply closet. But Miss Dietrich had
not said make it like any other spring-people-breeze ever seen before. She let it remain

Nancy Lee’s own. That is how the old Negro woman happened to be there looking at
the flag—for in her mind the flag, the spring, and the woman formed a kind of triangle
holding a dream Nancy Lee wanted to express. White stars on a blue field, spring, children,
ever-growing life, and an old woman. Would the judges at the Artist Club like it?

One wet, rainy April afternoon Miss O’Shay, the girls’ vice-principal, sent for Nancy
Lee to stop by her office as school closed. Pupils without umbrellas or raincoats were

clustered in doorways hoping to make it home between showers. Outside the skies were
gray. Nancy Lee’s thoughts were suddenly gray, too.

70