Not Algernon Clarence. My name's Charlie.'

'My mistake. And what's the great scheme, Mr Ferris? Do you want to
dance with me again?'

He did. So we started. Mine not to reason why, mine but to do and die,
as the poem says. If an elephant had come into Geisenheimer's and asked
me to dance I'd have had to do it. And I'm not saying that Mr Ferris
wasn't the next thing to it. He was one of those earnest, persevering
dancers--the kind that have taken twelve correspondence lessons.

I guess I was about due that night to meet someone from the country.
There still come days in the spring when the country seems to get a
stranglehold on me and start in pulling. This particular day had been
one of them. I got up in the morning and looked out of the window, and
the breeze just wrapped me round and began whispering about pigs and
chickens. And when I went out on Fifth Avenue there seemed to be
flowers everywhere. I headed for the Park, and there was the grass all
green, and the trees coming out, and a sort of something in the
air--why, say, if there hadn't have been a big policeman keeping an eye
on me, I'd have flung myself down and bitten chunks out of the turf.

And as soon as I got to Geisenheimer's they played that 'Michigan'
thing.

Why, Charlie from Squeedunk's 'entrance' couldn't have been better
worked up if he'd been a star in a Broadway show. The stage was just
waiting for him.

But somebody's always taking the joy out of life. I ought to have
remembered that the most metropolitan thing in the metropolis is a
rustic who's putting in a week there. We weren't thinking on the same
plane, Charlie and me. The way I had been feeling all day, what I
wanted to talk about was last season's crops. The subject he fancied
was this season's chorus-girls. Our souls didn't touch by a mile and a
half.

'This is the life!' he said.

There's always a point when that sort of man says that.

'I suppose you come here quite a lot?' he said.

'Pretty often.'

I didn't tell him that I came there every night, and that I came
because I was paid for it. If you're a professional dancer at
Geisenheimer's, you aren't supposed to advertise the fact. The
management thinks that if you did it might send the public away
thinking too hard when they saw you win the Great Contest for the
Love-r-ly Silver Cup which they offer later in the evening. Say, that
Love-r-ly Cup's a joke. I win it on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,
and Mabel Francis