fraid
to accept; afraid to refuse. He was in an excruciating dilemma. Prue had
mercy on him. She said:

"I'll just announce it as an idea of my own. You needn't have anything
to do with it."

The townspeople were set in a turmoil over Prue's latest audacity. Half
the church members declared it an outrage; the other half decided that
it gave them an opportunity to see her dance under safe auspices. Foxy
Prue!

XVII

The restaurant was crowded with unfamiliar faces, terrified at what they
were to witness. Doctor Brearley had not known what to do. It seemed so
mean to stay away and so perilous to go. His daughter solved the
problem by telling him that she would say she had made him come. He went
so far as to let her drag him in. "But just for a moment," he
explained. "He really must leave immediately after Mr. and Mrs.
Hippisley's--er--exercises." He apparently apologized to the other
guests, but really to an outraged heaven.

He trembled with anxiety on the edge of his chair. The savagery of the
music alarmed him. When Prue walked out with her husband the old Doctor
was distressed by her beauty. Then they danced and his heart thumped;
but subtly it was persuaded to thump in the measure of that unholy
Maxixe. He did not know that outside in the street before the two
windows stood two exiled fathers watching in bitter loneliness.

He saw a little love drama displayed, and reminded himself that, after
all, some critics said that the Song of Solomon was a kind of wedding
drama or dance. After all, Mrs. Hippisley was squired by her perfectly
proper and very earnest young husband--though Orton in his black clothes
was hardly more than her shifting shadow.

The old preacher had been studying his Cruden, and bolstering himself
up, too, with the very Scriptural texts that Prue had written out for
her stiff-necked father. He had met other texts that she had not known
how to find. The idea came to the preacher that, in a sense, since God
made everything He must have made the dance, breathed its impulse into
the clay.

This daughter of Shiloh was an extraordinarily successful piece of
workmanship. There was nothing very wicked surely about that coquettish
bending of her head, those playful escapes from her husband's embrace,
that heel-and-toe tripping, that lithe elusiveness, that joyous psalmody
of youth.

Prue was so pretty and her ways so pretty that the old man felt the
pathos of beauty, so fleet, so fleeting, so l