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“She is a very remarkable dancer,” he said at last, apologetically. “Do you know who she is?”

His partner had observed his interest with increasing disapproval, and she smiled triumphantly now at the chance that his question gave her.

“She is the seventh floor chambermaid,” she said. “I,” she added in a tone which marked the social superiority, “am a checker and marker.”

“Really?” said Van Bibber, with a polite accent of proper awe.

He decided that he must see more of this Cinderella of the Hotel Salisbury; and dropping his partner by the side of the lady recitationist, he bowed his thanks and hurried to the gallery for a better view.

When he reached it he found his professional friends hanging over the railing, watching every movement which the girl made with an intense and unaffected interest.

“Have you noticed that girl with red hair?” he asked, as he pulled up a chair beside them.

But they only nodded and kept their eyes fastened on the opening in the crowd through which she had disappeared.

“There she is,” Grahame West cried excitedly, as the girl swept out from the mass of dancers into the clear space. “Now you can see what I mean, Celestine,” he said. “Where he turns her like that. We could do it in the shadow-dance in the second act. It’s very pretty. She lets go his right hand and then he swings her and balances backward until she takes up the step again, when she faces him. It is very simple and very effective. Isn’t it, George?”

Lester nodded and said, “Yes, very. She’s a born dancer. You can teach people steps, but you can’t teach them to be graceful.”

“She reminds me of Sylvia Grey,” said Miss Chamberlain. “There’s nothing violent about it, or faked, is there? It’s just the poetry of motion, without any tricks.”

Lester, who was a trick dancer himself, and Grahame West, who was one of the best eccentric dancers in England, assented to this cheerfully.

Van Bibber listened to the comments of the authorities and smiled grimly. The contrast which their lives presented to that of the young girl whom they praised so highly, struck him as being most interesting. Here were two men who had made comic dances a profound and serious study, and the two women who had lifted dancing to the plane of a fine art, all envying and complimenting a girl who was doing for her own pleasure that which was to them hard work and a livelihood. But while they were going back the next day to be applauded and petted and praised by a friendly public, she was to fly like Cinderella, to take up her sweeping and dusting and the making of beds, and the answering of peremptory summonses from electric buttons.

“A good teacher could make her worth one hundred dollars a week in six lessons,” said Lester, dispassionately. “I’d be willing to make her an offer myself, if I hadn’t too many dancers in the piece already.”

“A hundred dollars–that’s twenty pounds,” said Mrs. Grahame West. “You do pay such prices over here! But I quite agree that she is very graceful; and she is so unconscious, too, isn’t she?”

The interest in Cinderella ceased when the waltzing stopped, and the attention of those in the gallery was riveted with equal intensity upon Miss Chamberlain and Travers who had faced each other in a quadrille, Miss Chamberlain having accepted the assistant barkeeper for a partner, while Travers contented himself with a tall, elderly female, who in business hours had entire charge of the linen department. The barkeeper was a melancholy man with a dyed mustache, and when he asked the English dancer from what hotel she came, and she, thinking he meant at what hotel was she stopping, told him, he said that that was a slow place, and that if she would let him know when she had her night off, he would be pleased to meet her at the Twenty-third station of the Sixth Avenue road on the uptown side, and would take her to the theatre, for which, he explained, he was able to obtain tickets for nothing, as so many men gave him their return checks for drinks.