Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior, approached Fanchon, when she had made her courtesy to Mrs. Schofield.  Fanchon whispered in Roderick’s ear also.

“Your hair is pretty, Roddy!  Don’t forget what you said yesterday!”

Roderick likewise blushed.

Maurice Levy, captivated by the newcomer’s appearance, pressed close to Roderick.

“Give us an intaduction, Roddy?”

Roddy being either reluctant or unable to perform the rite, Fanchon took matters into her own hands, and was presently favourably impressed with Maurice, receiving the information that his tie had been brought to him by his papa from Skoone’s, whereupon she privately informed him that she liked wavy hair, and arranged to dance with him.  Fanchon also thought sandy hair attractive, Sam Williams discovered, a few minutes later, and so catholic was her taste that a ring of boys quite encircled her before the musicians in the yard struck up their thrilling march, and Mrs. Schofield brought Penrod to escort the lady from out-of-town to the dancing pavilion.

Headed by this pair, the children sought partners and paraded solemnly out of the front door and round a corner of the house.  There they found the gay marquee; the small orchestra seated on the lawn at one side of it, and a punch bowl of lemonade inviting attention, under a tree.  Decorously the small couples stepped upon the platform, one after another, and began to dance.

“It’s not much like a children’s party in our day,” Mrs. Williams said to Penrod’s mother.  “We’d have been playing ‘Quaker-meeting,’ ’Clap-in, Clap-out,’ or ‘Going to Jerusalem,’ I suppose.”

“Yes, or ‘Post-office’ and ‘Drop-the-handkerchief,’” said Mrs. Schofield.  “Things change so quickly.  Imagine asking little Fanchon Gelbraith to play ‘London Bridge’!  Penrod seems to be having a difficult time with her, poor boy; he wasn’t a shining light in the dancing class.”

However, Penrod’s difficulty was not precisely of the kind his mother supposed.  Fanchon was showing him a new step, which she taught her next partner in turn, continuing instructions during the dancing.  The children crowded the floor, and in the kaleidoscopic jumble of bobbing heads and intermingling figures her extremely different style of motion was unobserved by the older people, who looked on, nodding time benevolently.

Fanchon fascinated girls as well as boys.  Many of the former eagerly sought her acquaintance and thronged about her between the dances, when, accepting the deference due a cosmopolitan and an oracle of the mode, she gave demonstrations of the new step to succeeding groups, professing astonishment to find it unknown:  it had been “all the go,” she explained, at the Long Shore Casino for fully two seasons.  She pronounced “slow” a “Fancy Dance” executed during an intermission by Baby Rennsdale and Georgie Bassett, giving it as her opinion that Miss Rennsdale and Mr. Bassett were “dead ones”; and she expressed surprise that the punch bowl contained lemonade and not champagne.