"Say, Prue, you've got to listen! I'm invited to visit the swellest home in Council Bluffs for a house-party. They call it a week-end; that shows how swell they are. They're going to dance all the time. When it comes to these new dances I'm weak at both ends, head and feet." She laughed shamelessly at her own joke, as women do. "I don't want to go there like I'd never been any place, or like Carthage wasn't up to date. I'm just beginning to get the hang of the Maxixe and the Hesitation, and I thought if you could give me a couple of days' real hard work I wouldn't be such an awful gump. Could you? Do you suppose you could? Or could you?" Prue looked such astonishment at this that Idalene hastened to say: "O' course I'm not asking you to kill yourself for nothing. How much would you charge? Of course I haven't much saved up; but I thought if I took two lessons a day you could make me a special rate. How much would it be, d'you s'pose? Or what do you think?" Prue wondered. This was a new and thrilling moment for her. A boy is excited enough over the first penny he earns, but he is brought up to earn money. To a girl, and a girl like Prue, the luxury was almost intolerably intense. She finally found voice to murmur: "How much you gettin' for the lessons you give?" Idalene had, for the sake of pin money, been giving a few alleged lessons in piano, voice, water-colors, bridge whist, fancy stitching, brass-hammering, and things like that. She answered Prue with reluctance: "I get fifty cents an hour. But o' course I make a specialty of those things." "I'm making a specialty of dancing," said Prue, coldly. Idalene was torn between the bitterly opposite emotions of getting and giving. Prue tried to speak with indifference, but she looked as greedy as the old miser in the "Chimes of Normandy." "Fifty cents suits me, seeing it's you." Idalene gasped: "Well, o' course, two lessons a day would be a dollar. Could you make it six bits by wholesale?" Prue didn't see how she could. Teaching would interfere so with her amusements. Finally Idalene sighed: "Oh, well, all right! Call it fifty cents straight. When can I come over to your house?" "To my house?" gasped Prue. "Papa doesn't approve of my dancing. I'll come to yours." "Oh no, you won't," gasped Idalene. "My father doesn't dream that I dance. I'm going to let him sleep as long as I can." Here was a plight! Mrs. Judge Hippisley strolled up and demanded, "What's all this whispering about?" They explained their predicament. Mrs. Hippisley thought it was a perfectly wonderful idea to take lessons. She would let Prue teach Idalene in her parlor if Prue would teach her at the same time for nothing. "Unless you think I'm too old and stupid to learn," she added, fishingly. Prue put a catfish on her hook: "Oh, Mrs. Hippisley, I've seen women much older and fatter and stupider than you dancing in Chicago."