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Webster, Henry Kitchell, 1875-1932

"The Real Adventure"


It wasn't pretty, the dance step he executed--a sort of stiff-legged
skip accompanied by a vulgar hip wriggle and concluding with a
straight-out sidewise kick.
A sick disgust clutched at Rose as she watched--an utter revulsion from
the whole loathly business. She could scrub floors--starve if she had
to. She couldn't do the thing he demanded of her here out in the middle
of the floor, in her street clothes, without the excuse of music to make
it tolerable--and before that row of leering faces.
"Well?" he asked, turning to her as he finished. He wasn't smiling at
all.
"I'm not dressed to do that," she said.
"I know you're not," he admitted coolly, "but it can be done. Pick up
your skirts and do it as you are,--if you really want a job."
There was just a faint edge of contempt in that last phrase and,
mercifully, it roused her anger. A blaze kindled in her blue eyes, and
two spots of vivid color defined themselves in her cheeks.
She caught up her skirts as he had told her to do, executed without
compromise the stiff-legged skip and the wriggle, and finished with a
horizontal sidewise kick that matched his own.


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