Ardelia performed an audacious pas seul and reached for her olive.
“Ja, danky shun, Dutchy,” she said airily, and as the hurdy-gurdy moved away, and the oboe of the Italian band began to run up and down the scale, she sank upon her cool step, stretched her toes and sighed.
“Gee!” she murmured, “N’Yawk’s the place!”
EDGAR, THE CHOIR BOY UNCELESTIAL
You all know how they look in the pictures—enlarged photogravures, mostly: they have appealing violet eyes and drooping mouths and oval faces. They tip their heads back and to the side, and there is usually a broad beam of light falling across their little official nighties. People frame them in Flemish oak and hang them over the piano, and little girls long to resemble them.
But Edgar was not that kind. So greatly did he differ, in fact, that even the choirmaster, who ought to have known better, was deceived, and discovered him with difficulty. When that gentleman confronted them in the parish house, a mob of suspicious little boys, shoving, growling, snickering, and otherwise fulfilling their natures, he promptly selected Tim Mullaly, who possessed to an amazing degree the violet eyes and the drooping mouth and the oval face, as his first soprano. The choirmaster was young in years and his profession.
But Tim refused to sing the scale alone, and as the others scorned to accompany him in this exercise, Mr. Fellowes, determinedly patient, suggested in the hilarious “come-on-boys!” fashion consecrated to childhood by adults, that they should all join in some popular melody, to limber them up and dispel their uneasiness.
“But Tim refused to sing the scale alone.”
“What shall we sing?” he called out breezily, from the piano-stool, faintly indicating a “ragtime” rhythm with his left hand, still facing them as he searched the forbidding countenances before him for a gleam of friendship.