"Not in December, thanks!"
"Are you ready, girls?" asked Miss Paget, opening the door. "Miss Leighton has just come, and we're going to begin."
There was no doubt that the dances were extremely pretty. Miss Leighton was an excellent teacher, and her pupils did her credit. The audience was charmed, and clapped with the utmost enthusiasm at the end of each performance. There was a Daisy Dance, in which twelve little girls, dressed to represent daisies, went through a series of very graceful movements; and a Rose Gavotte that was equally pretty and tasteful. A Butterflies' Ball, in which the dancers waved gorgeous wings of painted muslin, was highly effective; and so was the Russian Mazurka, given by Vivien and Dorothy, attired in fur-trimmed costumes and high scarlet leather boots. The babies looked sweet in a Doll Dance, and little Beatrice Perry made a sensation by her pas seul as "Cupid", dressed in a classic toga with the orthodox bow and arrows. She was a beautifully made child of six, and danced barefooted, so she looked the part admirably, and quite carried the audience by storm.
Monica, with floating fair hair, a figured muslin dress and a basket of flowers, capered as a "Spring Wind" and dropped blossoms in the path of "April"; even Patsie, the overgrown, looked quite pretty in her Flower Quadrille. But everybody decided that the star of the afternoon was Claudia. She was beautiful to begin with, and her forget-me-not costume suited her exactly. Perhaps her long experience in posing as a model for her father's pictures made it easier for her to learn the right postures. She had dropped into the rhythmic dancing as into a birthright; her movements seemed the very embodiment of natural grace, and to watch her was like surprising the fairies at dawn, or the dryads and oreads in a classic forest. The best of Claudia was that she was quite without self-consciousness. She danced because she enjoyed it, not to command admiration. She received the storm of clapping quite as a matter of course, just as she took the exhibition of her many portraits in the Academy.
"I'd give anything to have your face," said Patsie enviously to her afterwards. "Some folks are luckers! Why wasn't I born pretty? It gives people such a tremendous pull!"
"I don't know," answered Claudia, rather taken aback at the question.
"Look here!" said Lorraine; "we've got to take the faces our mothers gave us. Haven't you heard of a beautiful plain person? I know several who haven't a single decent feature, and yet somehow they're lovely in spite of it all. Some of the most fascinating women in the world have been plain—George Sand hadn't an atom of beauty, and yet she enthralled two such geniuses as Chopin and Alfred de Musset."
"I'll go in for fascination, then," rattled on Patsie. "We can't all be in the same style. Claudia shall do the Venus business, and I'll be a what-do-you-call-it? Siren?"
"Oh, no! Sirens were wretches!"
"Why, I thought they were only a sort of mermaid! Well, I'll be very modern—chic, and spirituelle, and witty, and fin-de-siècle and all the rest of it; and I'll have a salon like those French women used to have, and everybody'll want to come to it, and talk about the charming Miss Sullivan, only perhaps I'll be Mrs. Somebody by that time! I hope so, at any rate. I don't mean to be left in the lurch, if I can help it!"