The dancing continued, the new step gaining instantly in popularity, fresh couples adventuring with every number.  The word “step” is somewhat misleading, nothing done with the feet being vital to the evolutions introduced by Fanchon.  Fanchon’s dance came from the Orient by a roundabout way; pausing in Spain, taking on a Gallic frankness in gallantry at the Bal Bullier in Paris, combining with a relative from the South Seas encountered in San Francisco, flavouring itself with a carefree negroid abandon in New Orleans, and, accumulating, too, something inexpressible from Mexico and South America, it kept, throughout its travels, to the underworld, or to circles where nature is extremely frank and rank, until at last it reached the dives of New York, when it immediately broke out in what is called civilized society.  Thereafter it spread, in variously modified forms—­some of them disinfected—­to watering-places, and thence, carried by hundreds of older male and female Fanchons, over the country, being eagerly adopted everywhere and made wholly pure and respectable by the supreme moral axiom that anything is all right if enough people do it.  Everybody was doing it.

Not quite everybody.  It was perhaps some test of this dance that earth could furnish no more grotesque sight than that of children doing it.

Earth, assisted by Fanchon, was furnishing this sight at Penrod’s party.  By the time ice-cream and cake arrived, about half the guests had either been initiated into the mysteries by Fanchon or were learning by imitation, and the education of the other half was resumed with the dancing, when the attendant ladies, unconscious of what was happening, withdrew into the house for tea.

“That orchestra’s a dead one,” Fanchon remarked to Penrod.  “We ought to liven them up a little!”

She approached the musicians.

“Don’t you know,” she asked the leader, “the Slingo Sligo Slide?”

The leader giggled, nodded, rapped with his bow upon his violin; and Penrod, following Fanchon back upon the dancing floor, blindly brushed with his elbow a solitary little figure standing aloof on the lawn at the edge of the platform.

It was Marjorie.

In no mood to approve of anything introduced by Fanchon, she had scornfully refused, from the first, to dance the new “step,” and, because of its bonfire popularity, found herself neglected in a society where she had reigned as beauty and belle.  Faithless Penrod, dazed by the sweeping Fanchon, had utterly forgotten the amber curls; he had not once asked Marjorie to dance.  All afternoon the light of indignation had been growing brighter in her eyes, though Maurice Levy’s defection to the lady from New York had not fanned this flame.  From the moment Fanchon had whispered familiarly in Penrod’s ear, and Penrod had blushed, Marjorie had been occupied exclusively with resentment against that guilty pair.  It seemed to her that Penrod had no right to allow a strange girl to whisper in his ear; that his blushing, when the strange girl did it, was atrocious; and that the strange girl, herself, ought to be arrested.