"That's her," said Eva briefly. "Sooner you stands on the stoop you shall see her better."
And when the two friends carried out this suggestion and mounted the nearest steps, Eva pointed to what seemed a bundle of inanimate rags.
"It's her baby," she disapprovingly remarked. "She lays it all times on steps. Somebody could to set on it sometimes."
"It's fierce," repeated Yetta, this time with more conviction. She was herself the guardian of three small and ailing sisters, and she knew that they should not be deposited on cold doorsteps. So she picked up Rosie's abandoned responsibility, and turned to survey that conscienceless Salome.
Rosie was, as a dancer should be, startlingly arrayed. Her long black-stockinged little legs ended in "fer-ladies-shoes" described by Eva. Her hair bobbed wildly in four tight little braids, each tied with a ribbon or a strip of cloth of a different color, and the rest of her visible attire consisted of a dirty kimona dressing-jacket, red with yellow flowers, and outlined with bands of green. The "fer-ladies-shoes" poised and pointed and twinkled in time to the wheezing of the one-legged hurdy-gurdy. The parti-colored braids waved free. The kimona flapped and fluttered and permitted indiscreet glimpses of a less gorgeous substructure.
Miss Gonorowsky regarded these excesses with a cold and disapproving eye. "She don't know what is _fer_ her," she remarked. "My mamma, she wouldn't to leave me dance by no organs. It ain't fer ladies."
"It's fierce," agreed Miss Aaronsohn, with a gulp, "it's something fierce."
The hurdy-gurdy coughed its way to the end of one tune, held its breath for an asthmatic moment, and then wailed into "The Sidewalks of New York." Fresh and amazing energy possessed the hair ribbons, the kimona, and the "fer-ladies-shoes." Fresh disdain possessed Miss Gonorowsky. The tune would have seemed also to work havoc upon the new propriety of Miss Aaronsohn.
"It's something fierce," she once more remarked, and then casting decorum to the winds, and the abandoned young Rashnowsky to Miss Gonorowsky's care, she sped down the steps, through the crowd and out into the ring.
Rosie, though she had never seen Miss Aaronsohn before, recognized her talent instantly, and welcomed her partnership with an ecstatic combination of the Cake Walk and the Highland Fling. Yetta returned the compliment in a few steps of the Barn Dance flavored with a dash of the Irish Jig. Then eye to eye, and hands on one another's shoulders, they fell to "spieling," with occasional Polka divertisements.