“Good-evening, miss.  Good-evening, miss.”

The two girls vanished rustlingly through a door over which was hung a piece of cardboard with the written words:  “Ladies’ cloakroom.”  In a few moments they emerged, white and fluffy apparitions, eager, self-conscious, and they vanished through another door.  Mr. Prohack judged from their bridling and from their whispers to each other that they belonged to the class which ministers to the shopping-class.  He admitted that they looked very nice and attractive; but he had the sensation of having blundered into a queer, hitherto unknown world, and of astonishment and qualms that his daughter should be a ruler in that world.

Lizzie stood up and peeped through a little square window in the match-boarding.  As soon as she had finished peeping Mr. Prohack took liberty to peep also, and the dance-studio was revealed to him.  Somehow he could scarcely believe that it was not a hallucination, and that he was really in Putney, and that his own sober house in which Sissie had been reared still existed not many miles off.

For Mr. Prohack, not continuously but at intervals, possessed a disturbing faculty that compelled him to see the phenomena of human life as they actually were, and to disregard entirely the mere names of things,—­which mere names by the magic power of mere names usually suffice to satisfy the curiosity of most people and to allay their misgivings if any.  Mr. Prohack now saw (when he looked downwards) a revolving disc which was grating against a stationary needle and thereby producing unpleasant rasping sounds.  But it was also producing a quite different order of sounds.  He did not in the least understand, and he did not suppose that anybody in the dance-studio understood, the delicate secret mechanism by which these other sounds were produced.  All he knew was that by means of the trumpet attachment they were transmitted through the wooden partition and let loose into the larger air of the studio, where the waves of them had a singular effect on the brains of certain bright young women and sombre young and middle-aged men who were arranged in clasped couples:  with the result that the brains of the women and men sent orders to their legs, arms, eyes, and they shifted to and fro in rhythmical movements.  Each woman placed herself very close—­breast against breast—­to each man, yielding her volition absolutely to his, and (if the man was the taller) often gazing up into his face with an ecstatic expression of pleasure and acquiescence.  The physical relations between the units of each couple would have caused censorious comment had the couple been alone or standing still; but the movement and the association of couples seemed mysteriously to lift the whole operation above criticism and to endow it with a perfect propriety.  The motion of the couples, and their manner of moving, over the earth’s surface were extremely monotonous; some couples indeed only walked stiffly to and fro; on the other hand a few exhibited variety, lightness and grace, in manoeuvres which involved a high degree of mutual trust and comprehension.  While only some of the faces were ecstatic, all were rapt.  The ordinary world was shut out of this room, whose inhabitants had apparently abandoned themselves with all their souls to the performance of a complicated and solemn rite.