“Oh, dance your old Fox-Trots,” she cried, with a gesture that seemed to motion Huntley and Hetty together. “Have your music all rattle and rag-time like sick people groaning in trains. That’s neither here nor there. I want to dance to better stuff than that. Come along, Willy.”
She seized on Wilmington’s arm.
“But where are you going?” cried Huntley.
“I’m going to dance Chopin in the hall—to the pianola.”
“You’re going to play,” she told Wilmington.
“But you can’t,” said Peter.
Joan disappeared with her slave. A light seemed to go out from the big library as she went. “Now we can get on,” said Hetty, laying hands on her Peter.
For a time the Fox-Trot ruled. The Vicarage girls didn’t do these things, and drifted after Joan. So did Oswald. Towards the end the dancers had a sense of a cross-current of sound in the air, of some adverse influence thrown across their gymnastics. When their own music stopped, they became aware of that crying voice above the thunder, the Revolutionary Etude.
There was a brief listening pause. “Now, how the deuce,” said Huntley, “can she be dancing that?”
He led the way to the hall....