ck till he could shift her
to the neck of some unhappy husband?

He remembered the fable of the ant and the locust. Prue was the locust,
frivoling away the summer. At the first cold blast she would be pleading
with the industrious ant, Ollie, to take her in. In the fable the locust
was turned away to freeze, but you couldn't do that with a human locust.
The ants just have to feed them. Poor Ollie!

Munching this quinine cud of thought, he went up to bed. He was footsore
from tramping the town for work. He had covered almost as much distance
as Prue had danced. He was all in. She was just going out.

She kissed him good night, but he would not answer. She went to kiss her
mother and Ollie and Horace. Ollie was practising shorthand, and kissed
Prue with sorrowing patience. Horace dodged the kiss, but called her
attention to an article in the evening paper:

"Say, Prue, if you want to get rich quick whyn't you charge for your
tango advice? Says here that teachers are springing up all over Noo York
and Chicawgo, and they get big, immense prices."

"How much?" said Prue, indifferently.

"Says here twenty-five dollars an hour. Some of 'em's earning a couple
of thousand dollars a week."

This information went through the room like a projectile from a
coast-defense gun. Serina listened with bated breath as Horace read the
confirmation. She shook her head:

"It beats all the way vice pays in this world."

Horace read on. The article described how some of the most prominent
women in metropolitan society were sponsoring the dances. A group of
ladies, whose names were more familiar to Serina than the Christian
martyrs, had rented a whole dwelling-house for a dancing couple to
disport in, so that the universal amusement could be practised
exclusively.

That settled Serina. Whatever Mrs. ---- and Miss ---- and the mother of
the Duchess of ---- did was better than right. It was swell.

Prue's frown now was the frown of meditation. "If they charge
twenty-five dollars an hour in New York, what ought to be the price in
Carthage?"

"About five cents a week," said Serina, who did not approve of Carthage.
"Nobody in this town would pay anything for anything."

"We used to pay old Professor Durand to teach us to waltz and polka,"
said Horace, "in the good old days before pop got the bankruptcy habit."

That night Prue made an experiment. She danced exclusively with Ort
Hippisley and Grant Beadle, the surest-footed bipeds in