Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/33

 made her strive to excel as leader of her high school gym class. In reward for her tireless application during senior year she was chosen to perform a strenuous Hungarian folk dance. As she stamped, leapt, and crouched she felt the most wonderful sensation of her life; the thunderous applause of students and faculty as she spread her arms at the end gave her the thrilling feeling of being loved, especially by the boys. You could, she discovered, express your inmost feelings unashamed before everyone in the dance. She decided then and there to continue dancing for audiences, even though first she had to become a gym teacher.

Of course, she had confided to herself in a mirror, I am not just pretty-pretty. I have an unusual face. Two woolly black tufts of hair bunching from a side part topping an arrow face cleft by a sharp aquiline nose nodded agreement, and she threw back her head to strengthen a slightly receding chin, a gesture she resolved to cultivate.

After her triumph with the Hungarian folk dance she had begun to explore the particular aesthetic world of the dance with the limited means at hand, chiefly magazines and books in the public library. Records of the scandalous Isadora Duncan and glowing accounts of Loie Fuller swirling in kaleidoscopically spotlighted great swaths of silks on Paris stages made dull indeed the prospect of teaching girls who considered gym a period of playful escape from more demanding studies.

A comfortable legacy from an uncle which her parents regarded as in the nature of heaven-sent bait to attract a worthy young man for their daughter, who lacked other attractions, seemed to Ilona a quite different sign from Heaven—that she was destined to be a dancer. Her father, the chief clerk of a large printing concern, was embarrassed by the revelation of this queer streak in an otherwise compliant daughter but, after mild objection, gave in to the persuasions of his wife.

"Ilona," Mrs. Klemper had said firmly, "is very artistic," adding as a clincher, "and a good sensible girl who won't do anything foolish."

The idea that a dancer might be one who created a style of her own never occurred to Ilona. At the end of her first year of teaching gym, she journeyed to New York and enrolled in the school of Morris Volkov, manufacturer and exporter of ready-made dances of all types to schools throughout the nation. At the term's end the world of professional dancing seemed farther away rather than Rh