"You'd better learn to dance yourself. Come on, I'll show you the Jedia Luna. It's very easy and awful refined. Do just like I do."
She put her hands on her hips and began to sidle. She had him nearly sidled into the bathtub before he could escape with the cry of a hunted animal. At supper he thumped the table with another of his resolutions, and cried:
"My house was not built for a dance-hall!"
"That's right, poppa," said Prue; "and it shakes so I'm afraid it'll come down on us. I've been thinking that you'll have to hire me the lodge-room in the Westcott Block. I can give classes there all day."
He refused flatly. So she persuaded Deacon Flugal and several gentlemen who were on the waiting-list of her pupils to arrange it for her.
And now all day long she taught in the Westcott Block. The noise of her music interfered with business—with lawyers and dentists and insurance agents. At first they were hostile, then they were hypnotized. Lawyer and client would drop a title discussion to quarrel over a step. The dentist's forceps would dance along the teeth, and many an uncomplaining bicuspid was wrenched from its happy home, many an uneasy molar assumed a crown. The money Prue made would have been scandalous if money did not tend to become self-sterilizing after it passes certain dimensions.
By and by the various lodge members found their meetings and their secret rites to be so stupid, compared with the new dances, that almost nobody came. Quorums were rare. Important members began to resign. Everybody wanted to be Past Grand Master of the Tango.
The next step was the gradual postponement of meetings to permit of a little informal dancing in the evening. The lodges invited their ladies to enter the precincts and revel. Gradually the room was given over night and day to the worship of Saint Vitus.
XIII
The solution of every human problem always opens another. People danced themselves into enormities of appetite and thirst. It was not that food was attractive in itself. Far from it. It was an interruption, a distraction from the tango; a base streak of materialism in the bacon of ecstasy. But it was necessary in order that strength might be kept up for further dancing.