joy but the hard quid pro quo. No blithe laughter, gay grotesquerie, or real roses—only crinkled things of paper crepe, the aroma of talcum, steam, and sweat, compounded; and the prevailing colour the sickly gilt—the sort that encrusts a radiator.
But one would be sadly lacking in humour to grow sententious over Standish's or to consider it worth an indictment. Besides, it served as an excellent background for the star's robustious dancing, a humour as galeful as the winds that snap around the Flatiron, and an impudence, at times disconcerting, at others well-nigh fetching. But so much for that.
On this evening of the fifth of September, Carlotta, the "divine Carlotta," she who, according to Abey Clout's four-sheet lyric, had performed a most extraordinary service for the world, nothing less than "putting the sin in sin-copation," made the last assault and charge with her lithe hips, and fled the white hoop of the calcium for her dressing-room.
Her metamorphosis from the little Yiddish tomboy who had danced and fought and bit her way up from Stanton Street, into the most approved type of showgirl, shoulder- and hip-sway, slang and all, had been little short of amazing. It was paralleled only by her brother Izzy's sloughing off of the old physical timidity of the Jew, and his debut as Joey McGann, "the Fightin' Harp," at the Harlem A. C. Both created sensations when they came back to Stanton Street (by the L as far as Grand, thence, for effect, by taxi). But for all this innocent show, they were together keeping
