rite.

Odd as the spectacle was, Mr. Prohack enjoyed it. He enjoyed the youth
and the prettiness and the litheness of the brightly-dressed girls and
the stern masculinity of the men, and he enjoyed the thought that both
girls and men had had the wit to escape from the ordinary world into
this fantastic environment created out of four walls, a few Chinese
lanterns, some rouge, some stuffs, some spangles, friction between two
pieces of metal, and the profoundest instinct of nature. Beyond
everything he enjoyed the sight of the lithest and most elegant of the
girls, whom he knew to be Eliza Brating and who was dancing with a
partner whose skill obviously needed no lessons. He would have liked to
see his daughter Sissie in Eliza's place, but Sissie was playing the
man's role to a stout and nearly middle-aged lady, whose chief talent
for the rite appeared to be an iron determination.

Mr. Prohack was in danger of being hypnotised by the spectacle, but
suddenly the conflict between the disc and the needle grew more acute,
and Lizzie, the guardian, dragged the needle sharply from the bosom of
its antagonist. The sounds ceased, and the brains of the couples in the
studio, no longer inspired by the sounds, ceased to inspire the muscles
of the couples, and the rite suddenly finished. Mr. Prohack drew breath.

"To think," he reflected, "that this sort of thing is seriously going on
all over London at this very instant, and that many earnest persons are
making a livelihood from it, and that nobody but me perceives how
marvellous, charming, incomprehensible and disconcerting it is!"

He said to the guardian:

"There doesn't seem to be much 'lesson' about this business. Everybody
here seems to be able to dance all right."

To which Lizzie replied with a sagacious, even ironic, smile:

"You see, sir, on these gala nights they all do their very best."

"Father!"

Sissie had arrived upon him. Clearly she was preoccupied, if not
worried, and the unexpected sight of her parent forced her, as it were,
unwillingly from one absorbing train of ideas into another. She was
startled, self-conscious, nervous. Still, she jumped at him and kissed
him,--as if in a dream.

"Nothing the matter, is there?"

"Nothing."

"I'm frightfully busy to-night. Just come in here, will you?"

And she took him into the ladies' cloakroom--an apartment the like of
which he had never before seen. It had only one chair, in front of a
sort of dressing-t