“In other words, you’re rotten. You can’t dance. But I’ll tell you one thing you’ve got.”
“Throw it all off of your system while you’re at it,” said Mac. “What’ve I got?”
“Genius,” said Del Delano. “Except myself, it’s up to you to be the best fancy dancer in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the colonial possessions of all three.”
“Smoke up!” said Mac McGowan.
“Genius,” repeated the Master—“you’ve got a talent for genius. Your brains are in your feet, where a dancer’s ought to be. You’ve been self-taught until you’re almost ruined, but not quite. What you need is a trainer. I’ll take you in hand and put you at the top of the profession. There’s room there for the two of us. You may beat me,” said the Master, casting upon him a cold, savage look combining so much rivalry, affection, justice, and human hate that it stamped him at once as one of the little great ones of the earth—“you may beat me; but I doubt it. I’ve got the start and the pull. But at the top is where you belong. Your name, you say, is Robinson?”
“McGowan,” repeated the amateur, “Mac McGowan.”
“It don’t matter,” said Delano. “Suppose you walk up to my hotel with me. I’d like to talk to you. Your footwork is the worst I ever saw, Madigan—but—well, I’d like to talk to you. You may not think so, but I’m not so stuck up. I came off of the West Side myself. That overcoat cost me eight hundred dollars; but the collar ain’t so high but what I can see over it. I taught myself to dance, and I put in most of nine years at it before I shook a foot in public. But I had genius. I didn’t go too far wrong in teaching myself as you’ve done. You’ve got the rottenest method and style of anybody I ever saw.”
“Oh, I don’t think much of the few little steps I take,” said Mac, with hypocritical lightness.
“Don’t talk like a package of self-raising buckwheat flour,” said Del Delano. “You’ve had a talent handed to you by the Proposition Higher Up; and it’s up to you to do the proper thing with it. I’d like to have you go up to my hotel for a talk, if you will.”
In his rooms in the King Clovis Hotel, Del Delano put on a scarlet house coat bordered with gold braid and set out Apollinaris and a box of sweet crackers.