syllable, which made Van Bibber think that she
was speaking of some religious body to which he belonged. But the
organist made his profession clear by explaining that the committee had
just invited him to oblige the company with a solo on the piano, but
that he had been hitting the champagne so hard that he doubted if he
could tell the keys from the pedals, and he added that if they'd excuse
him he would go to sleep, which he immediately did with his head on the
shoulder of the lady recitationist, who tactfully tried not to notice
that he was there.

They were all waltzing again, and as Van Bibber guided his partner for
a second time around the room, he noticed a particularly handsome girl
in a walking-dress, who was doing some sort of a fancy step with a
solemn, grave-faced young man in the hotel livery. They seemed by their
manner to know each other very well, and they had apparently practised
the step that they were doing often before.

The girl was much taller than the man, and was superior to him in every
way. Her movements were freer and less conscious, and she carried her
head and shoulders as though she had never bent them above a broom. Her
complexion was soft and her hair of the finest, deepest auburn. Among
all the girls upon the floor she was the most remarkable, even if her
dancing had not immediately distinguished her.

The step which she and her partner were exhibiting was one that probably
had been taught her by a professor of dancing at some East Side academy,
at the rate of fifty cents per hour, and which she no doubt believed was
the latest step danced in the gilded halls of the Few Hundred. In this
waltz the two dancers held each other's hands, and the man swung his
partner behind him, and then would turn and take up the step with her
where they had dropped it; or they swung around and around each other
several times, as people do in fancy skating, and sometimes he spun her
so quickly one way that the skirt of her walking-dress was wound as
tightly around her legs and ankles as a cord around a top, and then as
he swung her in the opposite direction, it unwound again, and wrapped
about her from the other side. They varied this when it pleased them
with balancings and steps and posturings that were not sufficiently
extravagant to bring any comment from the other dancers, but which were
so full of grace and feeling for time and rhythm, that Van Bibber
continually reversed his partner so that he might