And standing alone--burning with blushes, blinded with tears of mortification--I was put through my paces with a vengeance; but I really knew the manual as thoroughly as I knew the drill, and when it was over Mr. McDonough took the rifle from me, and exclaimed: "Well, saucer-eyes, you do know it! I'm d----d if you don't! and I'm sorry, little girl, I spoke so roughly to you!"
He held out his fat white hand to me, and as I took it he added: "You ought to stay in this business--you've got your head with you!"
It was a small matter, of course, but there was a faint hint of triumph in it, and the savor was very pleasant to me.
Naturally, with a salary of but three dollars a week, we turned to the management for our costumes. I wonder what the _danseuse_ of to-day would think of the costume worn by her sister of the "sixties"? Now her few gauzy limb-betraying skirts reach but to the middle of the thigh; her scrap of a bodice, cut far below the shoulder blades at the back, being absolutely sleeveless, is precariously held in place by a string or two of beads. To be sure, she is apt to wear a collar of blazing diamonds, instead of the simple band of black velvet that used to be sufficient ornament for the peerless Bonfanti and the beautiful and modest Betty Rigl, who in their graceful ignorance of "splits" and athletic "tours de force," managed in their voluminous and knee-long skirts to whirl, to glide, to poise and float, to show, in fact, the poetry of motion.
But we, this untrained ballet, were not Bonfantis nor Morlachis, and we wore our dancing clothes with a difference. In one dance we were supposed to be fairies. We wore flesh-colored slippers and tights. It took one full week of our two weeks' engagement to learn how to secure these treacherous articles, so that they would remain smooth and not wrinkle down somewhere or twist about. One girl never learned, and to the last added to the happiness of the public by ambling about on a pair of legs that looked as if they had been done up in curl papers the night before.
We each had seven white tarlatan skirts, as full as they could be gathered--long enough to come a little below the knee. Our waists were also flesh-colored, and were cut fully two or three inches below our collar-bones, so you see there was plenty of cloth at our backs to hook our very immature wings to. We had wreaths of white roses on our heads--Blanche, who was very frank, said they looked like wreaths of turnips--and garlands of white roses to wave in the dance. I remember the girl with the curled legs was loathed by all because she lassoed everyone she came near with her garland--so you see we were very decorous fairies, whether we were decorative or not.