The news spread like oil ablaze on water. Mrs. Hippisley had consented to take lessons of Prue, but she had never dreamed of losing her eldest son to her. She and Serina had quite a "run-in" on the telephone. William and the judge almost had a fight-out—and right on Main Street, too.
Each accused the other of fathering a child that had decoyed away and ruined the life of the other child. Both were so scorched with helpless wrath that each went home to his bed and threatened to bite any hand that was held out in comfort. Judge Hippisley had just strength enough to send word to poor Olive that she was fired.
XVI
The next news came the next day. Oscawanna had been famished for a sight of the world-sweeping dances. It turned out in multitudes to see the famous Carthage queen in the new steps. The opera-house there had not held such a crowd since William J. Bryan spoke there—the time he did not charge admission. According to the Oscawanna Eagle: "This enterprising city paid one thousand dollars to see Peerless Prue Pepperall dance with her partner Otto Hipkinson. What you got to say about that, ye scribes of Carthage?"
Like the corpse in Ben King's poem, Judge Hippisley sat up at the news and said: "What's that?" And when the figures were repeated he "dropped dead again."
The next day word was received that Perkinsville, jealous of Oscawanna, had shoveled twelve hundred dollars into the drug-store where tickets were sold. Two sick people had nearly died because they couldn't get their prescriptions filled for twelve hours, and the mayor of the town had had to go behind the counter and pick out his own stomach bitters.
The Athens theater had been sold out so quickly that the town hall was engaged for a special matinée. Athens paid about fifteen hundred dollars. The Athenians had never suspected that there was so much money in town. People who had not paid a bill for months managed to dig up cash for tickets.
Indignant Oscawanna wired for a return engagement, so that those who had been crowded out could see the epoch-making dances. Those who had seen them wanted to see them again. In the mornings Prue gave lessons to select classes at auction prices.
Wonderful as this was, unbelievable, indeed, to Carthage, it was not surprising. This blue and lonely dispeptic world has always been ready to enrich the lucky being that can tempt its palate with something it wants and didn't know it wanted. Other people were leaping from poverty to wealth all over the world for teaching the world to dance again. Prue caught the crest of the wave that overswept a neglected region.
The influence of her success on her people and her neighbors was bound to be overwhelming. The judge modulated from a contemptuous allusion to "that Pepperall cat" to "my daughter-in-law." Prue's father, who had never watched her dance, had refused to collaborate even that far in her ruination, could not continue to believe that she was entirely lost when she was so conspicuously found.