The large man at the piano, who always looked half asleep, thundered out the first bars of the latest waltz, and the business began. [Illustration: “_A line of toes rose gradually._”] Their eyes were fixed solemnly on Miss Dorothy’s pointed shoes. They slipped and slid and crossed their legs and arched their pudgy insteps; the boys breathed hard over their gleaming collars. On the right side of the hall thirty hands held out their diminutive skirts at an alluring angle. On the left, neat black legs pattered diligently through mystic evolutions. The chords rolled out slower, with dramatic pauses between; sharp clicks of the castanets rang through the hall; a line of toes rose gradually towards the horizontal, whirled more or less steadily about, crossed behind, bent low, bowed, and with a flutter of skirts resumed the first position. A little breeze of laughing admiration circled the row of mothers and aunts. “Isn’t that too cunning! Just like a little ballet! Aren’t they graceful, really, now!” “_One_, two, three! _One_, two, three! Slide, slide, cross; _one_, two, three!” There are those who find pleasure in the aimless intricacies of the dance; self-respecting men even have been known voluntarily to frequent assemblies devoted to this nerve-racking attitudinizing futility. Among such, however, you shall seek in vain in future years for Richard Carr Pendleton. “_One_, two, three! _Reverse_, two, three!” If you want your heels clipped, step back inadvertently into Master Pendleton’s domain. No matter how pure your purposes, you will illustrate the inevitable doom of the transgressor against nature’s immutable limitations; you will be severely nipped. And it will be just—he is triumphantly following the rules. The whistle shrilled. “Ready for the two-step, children!” A mild tolerance grew on him. If dancing must be, better the two-step than anything else. It is not an alluring dance, your two-step; it does not require temperament. Any one with a firm intention of keeping the time and a strong arm can drag a girl through it very acceptably. It was Dicky’s custom to hurl himself at the colored bunch nearest him, seize a Sabine, so to speak, and plunge into the dance. He had his eye on Louise Hetherington, a large, plump girl, with a tremendous braid of hair. She was a size too big for the class, but everybody liked to dance with her, for she knew how, and piloted her diminutive partners with great skill. But she had been snapped up by the six-year-old Harold, and was even now guiding his infant steps around the hall. Dicky skirted the row of mothers and aunts cautiously. Heaven send Miss Dorothy was not looking at him! She seemed to have eyes in the back of her head, that woman.