depravity. School
had taught her many things not laid down in the official course of
study.

"Ain't that fierce?" she murmured.

Not all subjects of gossip are as confirmative as Rosie Rashnowsky that
day proved herself to be. For as Yetta and Eva turned into Clinton
Street, Rosie was discovered dancing madly to the strains of a
one-legged hurdy-gurdy, in the midst of an envious but not emulating
crowd.

"That's her," said Eva briefly. "Sooner you stands on the stoop you
shall see her better."

And when the two friends carried out this suggestion and mounted the
nearest steps, Eva pointed to what seemed a bundle of inanimate rags.

"It's her baby," she disapprovingly remarked. "She lays it all times on
steps. Somebody could to set on it sometimes."

"It's fierce," repeated Yetta, this time with more conviction. She was
herself the guardian of three small and ailing sisters, and she knew
that they should not be deposited on cold doorsteps. So she picked up
Rosie's abandoned responsibility, and turned to survey that
conscienceless Salome.

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 aba