d spatter
me I shall tell papa--you _will_ care, when I tell him just the same!
You're just as bad as you can be. I shan't speak with you to-day!"

She pursed up her lips and maintained a determined silence. He rubbed
his legs together with renewed emphasis. Acquaintances met them and
passed, unconscious of anything but the sweet picture of a sister and a
brother and a plush bag going dutifully and daintily to dancing school.

He jumped over the threshold of the long room and aimed his cap at the
head of a boy he knew, who was standing on one foot to put on a slipper.
This destroyed his friend's balance, and a cheerful scuffle followed.
Life assumed a more hopeful aspect.

A shrill whistle called them out in two crowded bunches to the polished
floor.

Hoping against hope, he had clung to the beautiful thought that Miss
Dorothy would be sick, that she had missed her train--but no! There she
was, with her shiny high-heeled slippers, her pink skirt that puffed
out like a fan, and her silver whistle on a chain. The little clicking
castanets that rang out so sharply were in her hand beyond a doubt.

"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, how