A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.
In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number of black-gowned girls.

The black gown might almost be called the mark of the dance-hall _habitue_, the girl who is dance mad and who spends all her evenings going from one resort to another.

She wears black because light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.
An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler." This is a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled and untiring dancer.

The business of the spieler is to look after the wall-flowers.

He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he dances with her and brings other partners to her.