Rosie was, as a dancer should be, startlingly arrayed. Her long black-stockinged little legs ended in "fer-ladies-shoes" described by Eva. Her hair bobbed wildly in four tight little braids, each tied with a ribbon or a strip of cloth of a different color, and the rest of her visible attire consisted of a dirty kimona dressing-jacket, red with yellow flowers, and outlined with bands of green. The "fer-ladies-shoes" poised and pointed and twinkled in time to the wheezing of the one-legged hurdy-gurdy. The parti-colored braids waved free. The kimona flapped and fluttered and permitted indiscreet glimpses of a less gorgeous substructure.
Miss Gonorowsky regarded these excesses with a cold and disapproving eye. "She don't know what is fer her," she remarked. "My mamma, she wouldn't to leave me dance by no organs. It ain't fer ladies."
"It's fierce," agreed Miss Aaronsohn, with a gulp, "it's something fierce."
The hurdy-gurdy coughed its way to the end of one tune, held its breath for an asthmatic moment, and then wailed into "The Sidewalks of New York." Fresh and amazing energy possessed the hair ribbons, the kimona, and the "fer-ladies-shoes." Fresh disdain possessed Miss Gonorowsky. The tune would have seemed also to work havoc upon the new propriety of Miss Aaronsohn.
"It's something fierce," she once more remarked, and then casting decorum to the winds, and the abandoned young Rashnowsky to Miss Gonorowsky's care, she sped down the steps, through the crowd and out into the ring.
Rosie, though she had never seen Miss Aaronsohn before, recognized her talent instantly, and welcomed her partnership with an ecstatic combination of the Cake Walk and the Highland Fling. Yetta returned the compliment in a few steps of the Barn Dance flavored with a dash of the Irish Jig. Then eye to eye, and hands on one another's shoulders, they fell to "spieling," with occasional Polka divertisements.
A passing stranger stopped to watch them and gave the organ-man largesse, so that still he played, and still they danced until called back to duty and reality by the uproar of the baby, now thrice abandoned. For Eva Gonorowsky had gone virtuously home, feeling that her traditions had been outraged, her friendship despised, and that her disciple had disgraced her.
Yetta and Rosie with the heavy-headed baby followed the organ for several blocks. They might have gone on forever like the Pied Piper's rats, had not the howls of the youngest Rashnowsky anchored and steadied them. When at last they had recovered breath and the proprieties, they sat amicably down upon an alien doorstep, and went back to the early—and in their case neglected—preliminaries of friendship.
They exchanged names, ages, addresses, the numbers of their family, and their own places in the scale. The baby had obligingly gone to sleep, and these amenities were carried out in due form. It seemed that they were bound by many similarities of circumstance and fate: each was the eldest of a family, but whereas Rosie could boast but one baby, Yetta's mother had three. Both mothers worked at low and ill-paid branches of the tailor's art. And both children were fatherless to all daily intents and purposes.
"Mine papa," Yetta told her new little friend, "is pedlar-mans on the country. Me und mine mamma don't know where he is even. From long we ain't got no letters off of him, und no money. My mamma, she has awful sads over it."