Thereafter it spread, in variously modified forms--some of
them disinfected--to watering-places, and thence, carried by hundreds of
older male and female Fanchons, over the country, being eagerly adopted
everywhere and made wholly pure and respectable by the supreme moral
axiom that anything is all right if enough people do it. Everybody was
doing it.
Not quite everybody. It was perhaps some test of this dance that earth
could furnish no more grotesque sight than that of children doing it.
Earth, assisted by Fanchon, was furnishing this sight at Penrod's party.
By the time ice-cream and cake arrived, about half the guests had
either been initiated into the mysteries by Fanchon or were learning
by imitation, and the education of the other half was resumed with the
dancing, when the attendant ladies, unconscious of what was happening,
withdrew into the house for tea.
"That orchestra's a dead one," Fanchon remarked to Penrod. "We ought to
liven them up a little!"
She approached the musicians.
"Don't you know," she asked the leader, "the Slingo Sligo Slide?"
The leader giggled, nodded, rapped with his bow upon his violin; and
Penrod, following Fanchon back upon the dancing floor, blindly brushed
with his elbow a solitary little figure standing aloof on the lawn at
the edge of the platform.
It was Marjorie.
In no mood to approve of anything introduced by Fanchon, she had
scornfully refused, from the first, to dance the new "step," and,
because of its bonfire popularity, found herself neglected in a society
where she had reigned as beauty and belle.
Pages:
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229