All this presented the art to me in a singular light, to be sure.  Caddy enjoyed the effect of her communication and cheerfully recounted the particulars of her own studies.

“You see, my dear, to save expense I ought to know something of the piano, and I ought to know something of the kit too, and consequently I have to practise those two instruments as well as the details of our profession.  If Ma had been like anybody else, I might have had some little musical knowledge to begin upon.  However, I hadn’t any; and that part of the work is, at first, a little discouraging, I must allow.  But I have a very good ear, and I am used to drudgery—­I have to thank Ma for that, at all events—­ and where there’s a will there’s a way, you know, Esther, the world over.”  Saying these words, Caddy laughingly sat down at a little jingling square piano and really rattled off a quadrille with great spirit.  Then she good-humouredly and blushingly got up again, and while she still laughed herself, said, “Don’t laugh at me, please; that’s a dear girl!”

I would sooner have cried, but I did neither.  I encouraged her and praised her with all my heart.  For I conscientiously believed, dancing-master’s wife though she was, and dancing-mistress though in her limited ambition she aspired to be, she had struck out a natural, wholesome, loving course of industry and perseverance that was quite as good as a mission.

“My dear,” said Caddy, delighted, “you can’t think how you cheer me.  I shall owe you, you don’t know how much.  What changes, Esther, even in my small world!  You recollect that first night, when I was so unpolite and inky?  Who would have thought, then, of my ever teaching people to dance, of all other possibilities and impossibilities!”

Her husband, who had left us while we had this chat, now coming back, preparatory to exercising the apprentices in the ball-room, Caddy informed me she was quite at my disposal.  But it was not my time yet, I was glad to tell her, for I should have been vexed to take her away then.  Therefore we three adjourned to the apprentices together, and I made one in the dance.

The apprentices were the queerest little people.  Besides the melancholy boy, who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing alone in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty little limp girl in a gauzy dress.  Such a precocious little girl, with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule.  Such mean little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles, and cramp-bones in their pockets, and the most untidy legs and feet—­and heels particularly.

I asked Caddy what had made their parents choose this profession for them.  Caddy said she didn’t know; perhaps they were designed for teachers, perhaps for the stage.  They were all people in humble circumstances, and the melancholy boy’s mother kept a ginger-beer shop.