Their friend Winnie came out to meet them, looking rather astonished.
“We’re going to learn,” shouted Lu, “get on your bonnet.”
“But you wasn’t good to me to-day,” said Winnie, thoughtfully.
“We didn’t da’st to be,” said Kathie, “till we’d asked somebody that knew.”
Mrs. Tennyson was half of the mind to call her little daughter in; yet she felt it a pity to be less sweet and forgiving than the child.030
Winnie already had her class before her. “Now you must do just as I do. You must hold your dress back so,—not grab it, but hold it back nice, and you must bend forward so, and you must point your slippers so,—not stand flat.”
Very graceful the little dancing-teacher looked, tip-toeing here, gliding there, twinkling through a series of pretty steps down the long garden walk.
But the pupils! Do the best she might, sturdy little Kathie couldn’t manage her dress. She grasped it tightly in either fat little fist. “Mother Bunch!” Lu giggled behind her back.
Kathie’s face got very red over that. It was well enough to be “Dumpling,”—everybody loves a dumpling; but “Mother Bunch!” So she bounced and shuffled a little longer, and then she said she was going home.
But Miss Lu wasn’t ready. She greatly liked the new fun, the hopping and whirling to Winnie’s steady “One, two, three! One, two, three!” There was a grown-up, affected smirk on her delicate little face, at which Mrs. Tennyson laughed every time she looked out. I think Lu would have hopped and minced up and down the walk until night, if Winnie’s mother hadn’t told them it was time to go.