He jumped over the threshold of the long room and aimed his cap at the head of a boy he knew, who was standing on one foot to put on a slipper. This destroyed his friend’s balance, and a cheering scuffle followed. Life assumed a more hopeful aspect. In the other dressing-room his sister had fluttered into a whispering, giggling, many-colored throng; buzzing and chuckling with the rest, she adjusted her slippers, and perked out her bows, her braids quivering with sociability.
A shrill whistle called them out in two crowding bunches to the polished floor.
Hoping against hope, he had clung to the beautiful thought that Miss Dorothy would be sick, that she had missed her train—but no! there she was, with her shiny high-heeled slippers, her pink skirt that pulled out like a fan, and her silver whistle on a chain. The little clicking castanets that rang out so sharply were in her hand beyond a doubt.
“Ready, children! Spread out. Take your lines. First position. Now!”
The large man at the piano, who always looked half asleep, thundered out the first bars of the latest waltz, and the business began.
“A line of toes rose gradually.”
Their eyes were fixed solemnly on Miss Dorothy’s pointed shoes. They slipped and slid and crossed their legs and arched their pudgy insteps; the boys breathed hard over their gleaming collars. On the right side of the hall thirty hands held out their diminutive skirts at an alluring angle. On the left, neat black legs pattered diligently through mystic evolutions.
The chords rolled out slower, with dramatic pauses between; sharp clicks of the castanets rang through the hall; a line of toes rose gradually towards the horizontal, whirled more or less steadily about, crossed behind, bent low, bowed, and with a flutter of skirts resumed the first position.
A little breeze of laughing admiration circled the row of mothers and aunts.