Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/74

62 she danced, not with the dainty grace of the Greek and Italian children, but with a wild abandon and agility which distracted even the pushcart vendors from their wares.

As, in not any too ripe a fulness of time, eight little animated steps—a curly-haired brother and seven little sisters—followed the fat, girdleless "Momma," Rosey, to keep this human stairway from collapse, joined the chorus of "The Queens of the East," American Wheel Burlesque, even disporting for one week at Miner's (where they "liked 'em fat," she confessed) but whose glory is now a pathetic legend.

Here an equipment of animal spirits, hard and sensuous good looks—really libeling her, for her head was level enough—together with that most surprising muscular agility, even promoted her to a place in the "olio," the intermission between the two tawdry acts of the performance. But after a year or two, tiring of the road, she blossomed out at a semi-foreign café, on a street that cuts Second Avenue, the boulevard of the Ghetto, midway to the East.

The storm that was hurling the Provincetown to her doom enveloped the whole coast, and drove its slanting lances on the dripping cabs herded in the triangle outside the café. But all was warmth where she sat at a table near the piano, waiting her turn, meanwhile usurping the others'. The rouge on her cheeks was heightened by the natural scarlet of good spirits, and her bobbed black mane swished from side to side over fleshy but shapely shoulders, as she quarreled with the manager. In this fashion of headdress she was, of course, a prophetess, anticipating the present