George doesn't know that she can dance. I do. Once Mr. Aix asked her to dance for him when I was in the room. Aunt Gerty played on the tin-kettle piano. Mother danced a cake-walk, which I thought very ugly, and then a queer step that a friend had taught her when she was a child. In one part of it she was dancing on her hands and her feet at the same time. It was the queerest thing, and she left her dress down for that and it lay in swirls about the carpet. Mr. Aix said it was the dance that Salome must have danced before Herod, and he quite understood John the Baptist, and where did she get it? But Mother wouldn't tell him. She said it was a memory of her stormy youth in the East End. Mr. Aix said that she could make her fortune doing it as a turn at a Society music hall, as it would be something quite new and decadent. That is just what Society wants--the slight, morbid flavour! Then Mother put on her short skirt and did the ordinary vulgar kind of dance they teach now, and I liked it best. She was everywhere at once, smart and spreading out in all directions, like spun glass on a Christmas card. Her eyes danced too. Ben said he couldn't have believed she was his mother! Then Aunt Gerty performed, and she is professional. But it was not the same thing. Aunt Gerty's legs are thick, and compared with Mother's like forced asparagus to the little pretty, thin, field-grown kind. Mother's dancing was emphatically dramatic, Mr. Aix said. I asked him if Mother could act, and he answered, "My dear child, your mother can do anything she has a mind to." "Then why doesn't she have a mind?" I at once said, forgetting how it would upset our household and George if she were to go on the stage. Mother naturally remembers this, and stays domestic out of virtue. "I wish you would write a play for me, Mr. Aix," said Aunt Gerty, "and I would get a millionaire to run it. I wonder, now, what one could do with Mr. Bowser?" She went off in a brown study, and Mr. Aix said rudely, "I will write a play for Lucy sooner," looking at Mother, who was sitting fanning herself with her pocket-handkerchief. "She has got the stuff in her, I do believe. Gad! What a chance! What a lever! What a facer--!" And he dropped off into a brown study too! Mother went and mended Ben's blazer. Mr. Aix isn't staying with us, we have no room in our house; he has a room over the coast-guard's wife, but he comes in to us for his meals. I don't believe George realizes this, or he would tell him he is throwing himself away, and losing a good chance of advertising his books. Mr. Aix's books seem to go without advertising, more than George's do--I suppose it is because they are so improper.