At breakfast Ollie waited on the table after compelling Serina to sit
down and eat. There was little to tempt the appetite and no appetite to
be tempted.
Papa was in the doldrums. He had always complained before of having to
gulp his breakfast and hurry to the shop. And now he complained because
there was no hurry; indeed, there was no shop. He must set out at his
time of years, after his life of independent warfare, to ask for
enlistment as a private in some other man's company--in a town where
vacancies rarely occurred and where William Pepperall would not be
welcome.
The whole town was mad at him. He had owed everybody, and then suddenly
he owed nobody. By the presto-change-o of bankruptcy his debts had been
passed from the hat of unpaid bills to the hat of worthless accounts.
Serina was as dismal as any wife is when she is faced with the prospect
of having her man hanging about the house all day. A wife in a man's
office hours is a nuisance, but a man at home in household office hours
is a pest. This was the newest but not the least of Serina's woes.
Horace was even glummer than ever, as soggy as his own oatmeal. At best
he was one of those breakfast bruins. Now he was a bear that has been
hit on the nose. He, too, must seek a job. School had seemed confining
before, but now that he must go to work, school seemed like one long
recess.
Even Ollie was depressed. Hers was the misery of an active person denied
activity. She had prepared herself as an aid in her father's business,
and now he had no business. In this alkali desert of inanition Prue's
vivacious temper would have been welcome.
"Where's Prue?" said papa for the fifth time.
Serina was about to say that she was still asleep when Prue made her
presence known. Everybody was apprised that the water had been turned on
in the bathroom; it resounded throughout the house. It seemed to fall
about one's head.
Prue was filling the tub for her Monday morning siesta. She was humming
a strange tune over the cascade like another Minnehaha. And from the
behavior of the dining-room chandelier and the plates on the sideboard
she was evidently dancing.
"What's that toon she's dancing to?" papa asked, after a while.
"I don't know," said Serina.
"I never heard it," said Ollie.
"Ah," growled Horace, "it's the Argentine tango."
"The tango!" gasped papa. "Isn't that the new dance I've been reading
about, that's making a sensation in New York?"
"Ah, wake up, pop!" said Horace. "It's a sensation here, too."
"In Carthage? They're dancing the tango in our home town?"
"Surest thing you know, pop. The whole burg's goin' bug over it."
"How is it done? What is it like?"
"Something like this," said Horace, and, rising, he indulged in the
prehistoric turkey-trot of a year ago, with burlesque hip-snaps and
poultry-yard scrapings of the foot.
"Stop it!" papa thundered. "It's loathsome! Do you mean to tell me that
my daughter does that sort of thing?"
"Sure! She's a wonder at it."
"What scoundrel taught my poor child such--such--Who taught her, I say?"
"Gosh!" sniffed Horace, "sis don't need teachin'. She's teachin' the
rest of 'em. They're crazy about her."
"Teaching others! My g-g-goodness! Where did she learn?"
"Chicago, I guess."
"Oh, the wickedness of these cities and the foreigners that are dragging
our American homes down to their own level!"
"I guess the foreigners got nothin' on us," said Horace. "It's a
Namerican dance."
"What are we coming to? Go tell Prue to come here at once. I'll put a
stop to that right here and now."
Serina gave him one searing glance, and he understood that he could not
deliver his edict to Prue yet awhile. He heard her singing even more
barbaric strains. The chandelier danced with a peculiar savagery, then
the dance was evidently quenched and subdued. Awestruck yowls from above
indicated that Prue was in hot water.
"This is the last straw!" groaned papa, with all the wretchedness of a
father learning that his daughter was gone to the bad.