“Isn’t that too cunning! Just like a little ballet! Aren’t they graceful, really, now!”
“One, two, three! One, two, three! Slide, slide, cross; one, two, three!”
There are those who find pleasure in the aimless intricacies of the dance; self-respecting men even have been known voluntarily to frequent assemblies devoted to this nerve-racking attitudinizing futility. Among such, however, you shall seek in vain in future years for Richard Carr Pendleton.
“One, two, three! Reverse, two, three!” If you want your heels clipped, step back inadvertently into Master Pendleton’s domain. No matter how pure your purposes, you will illustrate the inevitable doom of the transgressor against nature’s immutable limitations; you will be severely nipped. And it will be just—he is triumphantly following the rules.
The whistle shrilled.
“Ready for the two-step, children!”
A mild tolerance grew on him. If dancing must be, better the two-step than anything else. It is not an alluring dance, your two-step; it does not require temperament. Any one with a firm intention of keeping the time and a strong arm can drag a girl through it very acceptably. It was Dicky’s custom to hurl himself at the colored bunch nearest him, seize a Sabine, so to speak, and plunge into the dance. He had his eye on Louise Hetherington, a large, plump girl, with a tremendous braid of hair. She was a size too big for the class, but everybody liked to dance with her, for she knew how, and piloted her diminutive partners with great skill. But she had been snapped up by the six-year-old Harold, and was even now guiding his infant steps around the hall.
Dicky skirted the row of mothers and aunts cautiously. Heaven send Miss Dorothy was not looking at him! She seemed to have eyes in the back of her head, that woman.
“Oh, look! Did you ever see anything so sweet!” said somebody. Involuntarily he turned. There in a corner, all by herself, a little girl was gravely performing a dance. He stared at her curiously. For the first time, free from all personal connection with them, he discovered that those motions were pretty.
She was ethereally slender, brown eyed, brown haired, brown skinned. A little fluffy white dress spread fan-shaped above her knees; her ankles were bird-like. The foot on which she poised seemed hardly to rest on the ground; the other, pointed outward, hovered easily—now here, now there. Her eyes were serious, her hair hung loose. She swayed lightly; one little gloved hand held out her skirt, the other marked the time. Her performance was an apotheosis of the two-step: that metronomic dance would not have recognized itself under her treatment.