rously the small couples stepped upon the platform, one after
another, and began to dance.

"It's not much like a children's party in our day," Mrs. Williams said
to Penrod's mother. "We'd have been playing 'Quaker-meeting,' 'Clap-in,
Clap-out,' or 'Going to Jerusalem,' I suppose."

"Yes, or 'Post-office' and 'Drop-the-handkerchief,'" said Mrs.
Schofield. "Things change so quickly. Imagine asking little Fanchon
Gelbraith to play 'London Bridge'! Penrod seems to be having a difficult
time with her, poor boy; he wasn't a shining light in the dancing
class."

However, Penrod's difficulty was not precisely of the kind his mother
supposed. Fanchon was showing him a new step, which she taught her
next partner in turn, continuing instructions during the dancing. The
children crowded the floor, and in the kaleidoscopic jumble of bobbing
heads and intermingling figures her extremely different style of
motion was unobserved by the older people, who looked on, nodding time
benevolently.

Fanchon fascinated girls as well as boys. Many of the former eagerly
sought her acquaintance and thronged about her between the dances, when,
accepting the deference due a cosmopolitan and an oracle of the mode,
she gave demonstrations of the new step to succeeding groups, professing
astonishment to find it unknown: it had been "all the go," she
explained, at the Long Shore Casino for fully two seasons. She
pronounced "slow" a "Fancy Dance" executed during an intermission by
Baby Rennsdale and Georgie Bassett, giving it as her opinion that Miss
Rennsdale and Mr. Bassett were "dead ones"; and she expressed surprise
that the punch bowl contained lemonade and not champagne.

The dancing continued, the new step gaining instantly in popularity,
fresh couples adventuring with every number. The word "step" is somewhat
misleading, nothing done with the feet being vital to the evolutions
introduced by Fanchon. Fanchon's dance came from the Orient by a
roundabout way; pausing in Spain, taking on a Gallic frankness in
gallantry at the Bal Bullier in Paris, combining with a relative from
the South Seas encountered in San Francisco, flavouring itself with
a carefree negroid abandon in New Orleans, and, accumulating, too,
something inexpressible from Mexico and South America, it kept,
throughout its travels, to the underworld, or to circles where nature
is extremely frank and rank, until at last it reached the dives of New
York, when it immediately broke