d several gentlemen
who were on the waiting-list of her pupils to arrange it for her.

And now all day long she taught in the Westcott Block. The noise of her
music interfered with business--with lawyers and dentists and insurance
agents. At first they were hostile, then they were hypnotized. Lawyer
and client would drop a title discussion to quarrel over a step. The
dentist's forceps would dance along the teeth, and many an uncomplaining
bicuspid was wrenched from its happy home, many an uneasy molar assumed
a crown. The money Prue made would have been scandalous if money did not
tend to become self-sterilizing after it passes certain dimensions.

By and by the various lodge members found their meetings and their
secret rites to be so stupid, compared with the new dances, that almost
nobody came. Quorums were rare. Important members began to resign.
Everybody wanted to be Past Grand Master of the Tango.

The next step was the gradual postponement of meetings to permit of a
little informal dancing in the evening. The lodges invited their ladies
to enter the precincts and revel. Gradually the room was given over
night and day to the worship of Saint Vitus.

XIII

The solution of every human problem always opens another. People danced
themselves into enormities of appetite and thirst. It was not that food
was attractive in itself. Far from it. It was an interruption, a
distraction from the tango; a base streak of materialism in the bacon of
ecstasy. But it was necessary in order that strength might be kept up
for further dancing.

Deacon Flugal put it happily: "Eating is just like stoking. When I'm
giving a party at our house I hate to have to leave the company and go
down cellar and throw coal in the furnace. But it's got to be did or the
party's gotter stop."

Carthage had one good hotel and two bad ones, but all three were "down
near the deepo." Almost the only other place to eat away from home was
"Jake Meyer's Place," an odious restaurant where the food was ill chosen
and ill cooked, and served in china of primeval shapes as if stone had
been slightly hollowed out.

Prue was complaining that there was no place in Carthage where people
could dance with their meals and give "teas donsons." Horace was smitten
with a tremendous idea.

"Why not persuade Jake Meyer to clear a space in his rest'runt like they
do in Chicawgo?"

Prue was enraptured, and Horace was despatched to Jake with the proffer
of a magnif