Van Bibber listened to the comments of the authorities and smiled
grimly. The contrast which their lives presented to that of the young
girl whom they praised so highly, struck him as being most interesting.
Here were two men who had made comic dances a profound and serious
study, and the two women who had lifted dancing to the plane of a fine
art, all envying and complimenting a girl who was doing for her own
pleasure that which was to them hard work and a livelihood. But while
they were going back the next day to be applauded and petted and praised
by a friendly public, she was to fly like Cinderella, to take up her
sweeping and dusting and the making of beds, and the answering of
peremptory summonses from electric buttons.

"A good teacher could make her worth one hundred dollars a week in six
lessons," said Lester, dispassionately. "I'd be willing to make her an
offer myself, if I hadn't too many dancers in the piece already."

"A hundred dollars--that's twenty pounds," said Mrs. Grahame West. "You
do pay such prices over here! But I quite agree that she is very
graceful; and she is so unconscious, too, isn't she?"

The interest in Cinderella ceased when the waltzing stopped, and the
attention of those in the gallery was riveted with equal intensity upon
Miss Chamberlain and Travers who had faced each other in a quadrille,
Miss Chamberlain having accepted the assistant barkeeper for a partner,
while Travers contented himself with a tall, elderly female, who in
business hours had entire charge of the linen department. The barkeeper
was a melancholy man with a dyed mustache, and when he asked the English
dancer from what hotel she came, and she, thinking he meant at what
hotel was she stopping, told him, he said that that was a slow place,
and that if she would let him know when she had her night off, he would