"You bet! Papa, stand up and I'll show you the very newest roll. It's a
peach. Put your weight on your right leg. Say, it's a shame we haven't a
phonograph! Don't you suppose you could afford a little one? I could
have you all in fine form in no time. And it would be so good for
mamma."
Papa fell back into a chair with just strength enough to murmur, "I want
you to promise me never to dance it again."
"Don't be foolish, you dear old bump-on-a-log!"
"I forbid you to dance it ever again."
She laughed uproariously: "Listen at the old Skeezicks! Get up here and
I'll show you the cutest dip."
When at last he grew angry, and made her realize it, she flared into a
tumult of mutiny that drove him out into the rain. He spent the day
looking for a job without finding one. Horace came home wet and
discouraged with the same news. Ollie, the treasure, however, announced
that she had obtained a splendid position as typist in Judge Hippisley's
office, at a salary of thirty dollars a month.
William was overjoyed, but Serina protested bitterly. She and Mrs. Judge
Hippisley had been bitter social rivals for twenty years. They had
fought each other with teas and euchre parties and receptions from young
wifehood to middle-aged portliness. And now her daughter was to work in
that hateful Anastasia Hippisley's old fool of a husband's office? Well,
hardly!
"It's better than starving," said Ollie, and for once would not be
coerced, though even her disobedience was on the ground of service.
After she had cleared the table and washed the dishes she set out for
her room, lugging a typewriter she had borrowed to brush up her speed
on.
Prue had begged off from even wiping the dishes, because she had to
dress. As Ollie started up-stairs to her task she was brought back by
the door-bell. She ushered young Orton Hippisley into the parlor. He had
come to take Prue to a dance.
When papa heard this mamma had to hold her hand over his mouth to keep
him from making a scene. He was for kicking young Hippisley out of the
house.
"And lose me my job?" gasped Ollie.
The overpowered parent whispered his determination to go up-stairs and
forbid Prue to leave. He went up-stairs and forbade her, but she went
right on binding her hair with Ollie's best ribbon. In the midst of her
father's peroration she kissed him good-by and danced down-stairs in
Ollie's new slippers. Her own had been trotted into shreds.
Papa sat fuming all evening. He would not go to bed till Prue came home
to the ultimatum he was preparing for her. From above came the
tick-tock-tock of Ollie's typewriter. It got on his nerves, like rain on
a tin roof.
"To think of it--Ollie up-stairs working her fingers to the bone to help
us out, and Prue dancing her feet off disgracing us! To think that one
of our daughters should be so good and one so bad!"
"I can't believe that our little Prue is really bad," Serina sighed.
"Yet girls do go wrong, don't they?" her husband groaned. "This
morning's paper prints a sermon about the tango. Reverend Doctor
What's-his-name, the famous New York newspaper preacher, tears the whole
tango crowd to pieces. He points out that the tango is the cause of the
present-day wickedness, the ruin of the home!"
Serina was dismal and terrified, but from force of habit she took the
opposite side.
"Oh, they were complaining of divorces long before the tango was ever
heard of. That same preacher used to blame them on the bicycle, then on
the automobile and the movies. And now it's the tango. It'll be
flying-machines next."
Papa was used to fighting with mamma, and he roared with fine leoninity:
"Are you defending your daughter's shamelessness? Do you approve of the
tango?"
"I've never seen it."
"Then it must be just because you always encourage your children to
flout my authority. I never could keep any discipline because you always
fought for them, encouraged them to disobey their father, to--to--to--"
She chanted her responses according to the familiar family antipathy
antiphony. They talked themselves out eventually; but Prue was not home.
Ollie gradually typewrote herself to sleep and Prue was not home. Horace
came in from the Y. M. C. A. bowling-alley and went to bed, and Prue was
not home.
The old heads nodded. The sentinels slept. At some dimly distant time
papa woke with a start and inquired, "Huh?"