Page:To-morrow Morning (1927).pdf/112

 "Baby Stuart," a passe-partouted "Shakespeare's Birthplace."

The children were having dancing lessons, too. Kate painted a miniature of Ethel Anderson, to pay for them, and strained her eyes over a Battenberg lace collar for Charlotte to wear with a made-over black velvet of Lulu's. Jodie bobbed about dreamily, not at all bothered by the music, and Charlotte competently guided her partners through waltz and two-step and polka—one two three and a one two three! Hoagland went, too, and was having private lessons in the sailor's hornpipe beside. The children would find him, hot, red, despairing, puffing and pounding, when they arrived with their slipper bags, Miss Ethel skipping lightly before him, winding up air rope, touching herself fore and aft as a butterfly touches a rose, but despairing, too, clapping her hands for Miss Edna to stop playing and begin all over again.

There were other gayeties beside the dance. Children had birthdays, and blotted invitations on small sheets of note paper decorated with little boys and girls in color and "Come to my Party" arrived for Charlotte and Jodie, and Mrs. Driggs entertained for Master Driggs with box parties at the Palace—refined vaudeville—followed by ice cream at Goff's, far too often, the other mothers thought. But the children loved everything—the curtain with the lady in pink and the gentleman in pale blue, feeding swans from a boat that trailed a yellow silk parlor curtain in the