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But amid all these gross bosoms and figures some slim, pretty girls were observable. These still wore a modest expression despite their impudent gestures, for they were only beginners in their art, who had started life in the ballrooms of the slums and had been brought to Laure's by some customer or other.
He played the piano in the ballrooms of the district. He came in in a brand-new frock coat and patent leather shoes and sat down at the ivories. There was a pause and then the professor struck up, doloroso pianissimo, the tune of "Home, Sweet Home."
People liked something substantial when they had paid money for it; and they would look at her surrounded by her staff in charity ballrooms, with her high nose and her broad, square figure, attired in an uniform covered with sequins as though she were a general. The only thing against her was that she had not a double name.
Once they emerged long enough to hear the hostess speaking, as it were of yesterday, of a day when the new "German cotillion" was introduced, to make a sensation in New York; of a time when the best ballrooms were heated with wood stoves and lighted with lamps; and of a later but apparently still remote time when the Assemblies were "really, quite the smartest function of the season."
She had spent her one season of belledom in being whirled from festivity to festivity, in dancing in rooms festooned with thousands of dollars' worth of flowers, in lunching or dining at tables loaded with roses and violets and orchids, from which ballrooms or feasts she had borne away wonderful "favours" and gifts, whose prices, being recorded in the newspapers, caused a thrill of delight or envy to pass over the land.
I must confess I have heard scraps of chatter and chaff in ballrooms and theatres which have filled me with amazement, wondering how it could be possible that such poor stuff should pass muster as conversation, or coquetry, or gallantry, with the youths and maidens of to-day.
Each has its Exchange distinct from the other a distinct municipal court and public offices each has its centre of fashionable resort its favourite promenade for the flaneurs, of which the South-western metropolis can boast a large crowd its own theatres, ballrooms, hotels, and cafes. In fact, a walk of a few paces transports one into quite a different world.
The little groups, which are to-day characteristic of Anarchism, are his idea, and his, too, are the tactics of bomb-throwing. In the pamphlet on the scientific art of revolutionary warfare and dynamiters, he explains exactly where bombs should be placed in churches, palaces, ballrooms, and festive gatherings.
There were din and stink and dust beneath a savage sun, shaken into reverberations by the scream of an engine's safety valve. It was India in essence and awake! India arising out of lethargy! India as she is more often nowadays and it made King, for the time being of the Khyber Rifles, happier than some other men can be in ballrooms.
A special development of this aptitude in the hands of an expert gives the sea of humanity, not metaphorically but literally: the whirling of dancers in ballrooms, handkerchief-waving masses of people in balconies, hat-waving political ratification meetings, ragged glowering strikers, and gossiping, dickering people in the marketplace.
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