There is a real passion for dancing in the Village, and it is beautiful dancing that shows practice and a natural sense of rhythm.  The music may be only from a victrola or a piano in need of tuning, but the spirit is, most surely, the vital spirit of the dance.  At the Liberal Club everyone dances.  After you have passed through the lounge room—­the conventional outpost of the club, with desks and tables and chairs and prints and so on—­you find yourself in a corridor with long seats, and windows opening on to Nora Van Leuwen’s big, bare, picturesque Dutch Oven downstairs.  On the other side of the corridor is the dance room—­also the latest exhibition.  Some of the pictures are very queer indeed.  The last lot I saw were compositions in deadly tones of magenta and purple.  The artist was a tall young man, the son of a famous illustrator.  He strolled in quite tranquilly for a dance,—­with those things of his in full view!  All the courage is not on battlefields.

Said a girl, who, Village-like, would not perjure her soul to be polite: 

“Why so much magenta?”

And said he quite sweetly: 

“Why not?  I can paint people green if I like, can’t I?”

With which he glided imperturbably off in a fox trot with a girl in an “art sweater.”

Harry Kemp says:  “They make us sick with their scurrilous, ignorant stories of the Village.  Pose?  Sure!—­it’s two-thirds pose.  But the rest is beautiful.  And even the pose is beautiful in its way.  Life is rotten and beautiful both at once.  So is the Village.  The Village is big in idea and it’s growing.  They talk of its being a dead letter.  It’s just beginning.  First it—­the Village, as it is now—­was really a sort of off-shoot of London and Paris.  Now it’s itself and I tell you it’s beautiful, and more remarkable than people know.

“Uptowners, outsiders, come in here and insist on getting in; and, fed on the sort of false stuff that goes out through ‘novelists’ and ‘reporters,’ think that anything will go in the Liberal Club!  They come here and insult the women members, and we all end up in a free fight every week or so.  All the fault of the writers who got us wrong in the first place, and handed on the wrong impression to the world....”

The studio quarters of the Village are located in various places—­the South Side of Washington Square, the little lost courts and streets and corners everywhere, and—­Macdougal Alley, Washington Mews, and the new, rather stately structures on Eighth Street, which are almost too grand for real artists and yet which have attracted more than a few nevertheless.  I suppose that the Alley,—­jutting off from the famous street named for Alexander Macdougal,—­is the best known.

I remember that once, some years ago, I was hurrying, by a short cut, from Eighth Street to Waverly Place, and saw something which made me stop short in amazement.  As unexpectedly as though it had suddenly sprung there, I beheld a little street running at right angles from me, parallel with Eighth, but ending, like a cul de sac, in houses like those with which it was edged.  It was a quaint and foreign-looking little street and seemed entirely out of place in New York,—­and especially out of place plunged like that into the middle of a block.