goes for all! Go on and
tell, but you'll have the loneliest summer you've ever had, young lady!"

Five minutes later a treaty of peace was concluded on the basis of
secret understandings secretly arrived at, and Miss Tootsie Bedelle
replaced the dressmaker's figure in the arms of the triumphant diplomat
while the phonograph gave forth the strains of the Washington Post.

* * * * *

Tootsie's terpsichorean assistance was sorely needed. Skippy was not a
natural glider and gliding as Tootsie explained to him was essential in
a ballroom, in polite society at least. Skippy's feet could skip, hop
and jump with the best, but they were not, in any sense of the word,
gliders. The change from the inanimate embrace of the dressmaker's form
to Tootsie's pliant figure, however, worked such miracles that at the
end of twenty minutes' industrious application, Tootsie expressed
herself as astonished and delighted.

Now of course Skippy could have gone for instruction to Dolly Travers,
who was the object of these secret efforts. But that was not the Skippy
way. He had always shunned any exhibition of inferiority. Whatever was
to be learned he learned in privacy and exhibited in public. He had
taught himself to shoot marbles, to solve the intricate sequences of
mumblety peg, to throw an out-curve, to pick up a double hitch with one
hand, to chin himself, skin the cat and hang by his toes behind the safe
seclusion of the barn wall. Whatever his failures they were not
accompanied by the jeers of an audience. He had gone off in secret to
the swimming pool by Bretton's creek and smarted for hours under
crashing belly-whoppers until he had taught himself to dive forward and
backward. Then he watched with grinning superiority the fate of less
experienced youngsters who followed his dare.

So in the present sentimental crisis. To rank in the estimation of Miss
Dolly Travers there was no escaping the fact that he would have to
surrender his prejudices and incline his feet to the popular way. But
having reached this decision he determined to stage his effects. For two
more Saturdays he continued in dignified isolation to escort Miss
Travers to the weekly hop and back, guarding her scarf and fan,
straining his mouth into the semblance of an interested smile while
other fellows slipped their arms around the tiny figure and moved
dexterously or heavily about the ballroom.

On the third Saturday, halfway to the c