Immigrant children -- Fiction; Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Teachers -- Fiction
Rosie was, as a dancer should be, startlingly arrayed. Her long
black-stockinged little legs ended in "fer-ladies-shoes" described by
Eva. Her hair bobbed wildly in four tight little braids, each tied with
a ribbon or a strip of cloth of a different color, and the rest of her
visible attire consisted of a dirty kimona dressing-jacket, red with
yellow flowers, and outlined with bands of green. The "fer-ladies-shoes"
poised and pointed and twinkled in time to the wheezing of the
one-legged hurdy-gurdy. The parti-colored braids waved free. The kimona
flapped and fluttered and permitted indiscreet glimpses of a less
gorgeous substructure.
Miss Gonorowsky regarded these excesses with a cold and disapproving
eye. "She don't know what is _fer_ her," she remarked. "My mamma, she
wouldn't to leave me dance by no organs. It ain't fer ladies."
"It's fierce," agreed Miss Aaronsohn, with a gulp, "it's something
fierce."
The hurdy-gurdy coughed its way to the end of one tune, held its breath
for an asthmatic moment, and then wailed into "The Sidewalks of New
York." Fresh and amazing energy possessed the hair ribbons, the kimona,
and the "fer-ladies-shoes." Fresh disdain possessed Miss Gonorowsky. The
tune would have seemed also to work havoc upon the new propriety of Miss
Aaronsohn.
"It's something fierce," she once more remarked, and then casting
decorum to the winds, and the abandoned young Rashnowsky to Miss
Gonorowsky's care, she sped down the steps, through the crowd and out
into the ring.
Rosie, though she had never seen Miss Aaronsohn before, recognized her
talent instantly, and welcomed her partnership with an ecstatic
combination of the Cake Walk and the Highland Fling. Yetta returned the
compliment in a few steps of the Barn Dance flavored with a dash of the
Irish Jig. Then eye to eye, and hands on one another's shoulders, they
fell to "spieling," with occasional Polka divertisements.
A passing stranger stopped to watch them and gave the organ-man
largesse, so that still he played, and still they danced until called
back to duty and reality by the uproar of the baby, now thrice
abandoned. For Eva Gonorowsky had gone virtuously home, feeling that
her traditions had been outraged, her friendship despised, and that her
disciple had disgraced her.
Yetta and Rosie with the heavy-headed baby followed the organ for
several blocks. They might have gone on forever like the Pied Piper's
rats, had not the howls of the youngest Rashnowsky anchored and steadied
them. When at last they had recovered breath and the proprieties, they
sat amicably down upon an alien doorstep, and went back to the
early--and in their case neglected--preliminaries of friendship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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