this charity? I have no doubt that if it was advertised that Miss
Tavish and Mr. Jack Delancy would dance for the benefit of an East Side
guild in the biggest hall in the city, there wouldn't be standing room."

"Oh, bosh!" said Jack, getting up from his chair and striding about the
room, with more irritation than he had ever shown to Edith before. "I
wouldn't be a prude."

Edith's eyes flashed and her face flushed, but her smile came back in
a moment, and she was serene again. "Come here, Jack. Now, old fellow,
look me straight in the eyes, and tell me if you would like to have
me dance the serpentine dance before a drawing-room full of gossiping
women, with, as you say, just a few men peeping in at the doors."

Jack did look, and the serene eyes, yet dancing with amusement at the
incongruous picture, seemed to take a warmer glow of love and pleading.

"Oh, hang it! that's different," and he stooped and gave her an awkward
kiss.

"I'm glad you know it's different," she said, with a laugh that had not
a trace of mockery in it; "and since you do, you'd better go along and
do your charity, and I'll stay at home, and try to be--different when
you come back."

And Jack went; with a little feeling of sheepishness that he would not
have acknowledged at the time, and he found himself in a company where
he was entirely at his ease. He admired the dancing of the blithe,
graceful girl, he applauded her as the rest did with hand-clapping and
bravas, and said it was ravishing. It all suited him perfectly. And
somehow, in the midst of it all, in the sensuous abandon of this
electric-light eccentricity at mid-day, he had a fleeting vision of
something very different, of a womanhood of another sort, and a flush
came to his face for a moment as he imagined Edith in a skirt dance
under the gaze of this sensation-loving society. But this was only for
a moment. When he congratulated Miss Tavish his admiration was entirely
sincere; and the girl, excited with her physical triumph, seemed to him
as one emancipated out of acquired prudishness into the Greek enjoyment
of life. Miss Tavish, who would not for the world have violated one of
the social conventions of her set, longed, as many women do, for the
sort of freedom and the sort of applause which belongs to women who
succeed upon the stage. Not that she would have forfeited her position
by dancing at a theatre for money; but; within limits, she craved the
excitement, the abandon, t