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"It's over," the cleaning women said. "Young lady "
She drew up proudly then, as if they were paying homage, tucked her hair into a tarn, grabbed her polo coat, ran upstairs to the exit. Those cleaning women would be watching her quick little feet. They'd know she was a dancer. And there was a the dansant matinee day; not a minute to lose.
Out into the cold drab twilight, down the iron stairs she went. Wind spanked her ankles as she hurried across 42nd Street, her small determined steps light and airy. People turned to look, she knew, catching her own reflection in the plate glass. Oh I'm something, I am, she thought. And hadn't she known it from the first, the small blue-eyed child running away, watching herself in the store windows. She'd always been running, from the age of five, from every school, and been found and dragged back to the gentle rigor of the nuns only to run again, and finally to New York. In this great, teeming city you could be who you wished to be. Mae Murray was who she wished to be, somebody.
If she'd known it, she was one of thousands of pretty girls with flashing feet who came to New York following the dance craze. They'd fallen in love with the Castles just as Mae had; all America was smitten with them. Jazz had introduced an exhilarating rhythm, but the Castles were the ones who'd smoothed and refined it, beckoning old and young to move with them to a syncopated ragtime. Women across the country bobbed their hair because Irene Castle bobbed hers and imitated her daring clothes and hats. America was enchanted by the visible proof that a man and wife could dance through life. There was music everywhere; girls thronged the city to dance in chorus lines of the new revues and in the cabarets that had flashed open in clusters up and down Broadway; and in the heart of every chorine was one dream — the Ziegfeld Follies, Nowhere had a girl such a chance for fame or riches as with Ziegfeld. Look at the costumes, the salaries, the lavish settings; look at the gallants who crowded about the stage door. Erminie Clark had married this season right out of the Pink