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 out in what is called civilized
society.
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