"Ready, children! Spread out. Take your lines. First position. Now!"
The large man at the piano, who always looked half asleep, thundered out the first bars of the latest waltz, and the business began.
Their eyes were fixed solemnly on Miss Dorothy's pointed shoes. They slipped and slid and crossed their legs and arched their pudgy insteps; the boys breathed hard over their gleaming collars. On the right side of the hall thirty hands held out their diminutive skirts at an alluring angle. On the left, neat black legs pattered diligently through mystic evolutions.
The chords rolled out slower, with dramatic pauses between; sharp clicks of the castanets rang through the hall; a line of toes rose gradually towards the horizontal, whirled more or less steadily about, crossed behind, bent low, bowed, and with a flutter of skirts resumed the first position.
A little breeze of laughing admiration circled the row of mothers and aunts.
"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!"
The whistle shrilled.