Belles on their Toes

impression you make in high school decides whether you're popular," Jack agreed. "The boys from the upper classes come down by the front door and give the new girls the once-over."
    Jane also was to let her blonde hair grow and fix it page-boy. She was to stop that business of flopping into chairs as if she were playing a game of statues, and she wasn't to use any make-up except lipstick.
    Fred studied her face critically.
    "Dark red lipstick," he said. "That's the color for you. Right, Dan?"
    "Dark red," Dan agreed. "Not too much of it."
    "But Mother said I could wear all the make-up I wanted to when I got to high school," said Jane. "I don't know about all this little girl stuff. Did Mother put you boys up to this?"
    "I didn't have a thing to do with it," Mother protested. "I don't approve of make-up, but everyone I've seen in high school paints like an Indian. If that's the way you want to look, it's your face. See if I care!"
    "What everyone else does in high school is old stuff," Fred explained. "That's what we're trying to tell you. Do you want to be a sad apple?"
    Jane said she guessed that if she had to be any sort of an apple, she'd rather not be a sad one.
    Dan then showed her how she should sit down. He walked mincingly but with assumed nonchalance to a chair, turned around with a swing of his hips, rose on his tiptoes, sat down daintily with his knees together, and flounced as he adjusted an imaginary skirt.
    "It's that kind of jump you give at the end that gets them," he explained. "You see you act and dress casually, as if you didn't know men existed. But really you're on the ball all the time. And little things like that jump at the end emphasize all of a girl's best assets."
    Jane tried it, but the boys were far from satisfied. She tried it again, with no more success.
    "Don't jump like someone left a hatpin in the chair," Dan winced. "I'll swear, I believe you're hopeless. Don't you know how to do a feminine flounce?"
    "I did just like you did," said Jane, beginning to lose patience. "You jumped like something was in the chair, too, didn't he Mother?"
    Mother, sitting in a comer, pretended she was absorbed in a book, and didn't answer.
    "I'm not supposed to know exactly how to do it," Dan shouted. "All I can do is give you the general idea. For Lord's sake, don't girls have any natural instinct about how to do things like that?"
    "If they do," Jane said hotly, "it's the first time I ever heard about it. And I'm not going to listen if you holler at me. And I'm not going to dress that way, either."
    She stalked across the room, picked up a magazine, sat down by Mother, and—there was no doubt about it—flounced as she angrily adjusted her skirts.
    "That's it, Jane," Fred shouted. "Just like that."
    "Just like what?" Jane sulked. "You give me a pain in the neck, all of you."
    "What you did just then," said Fred, "when you fixed your skirts."
    "I didn't do anything," said Jane, "except this." She flounced again.
    "Solid," Dan agreed.
    "Well, why didn't you say so. Anybody knows how to do that." She flounced a third time. "The way Dan showed me, you'd need a built-in pogo stick. I thought you were supposed to see light between me and the chair."
    Somewhat pleased with herself, she rejoined the boys for further instruction.
    Jane already knew most of the new dance steps, so her brothers weren't worried about that. But they spent a good deal of time teaching her dance floor behavior.
    The boys thought that the most important formula for popularity at a dance was knowing how to act when someone cut in. They said they had seen many a girl who was good looking and a beautiful dancer, but who was stuck most of the night because she had given the impression she didn't like to be broken.
    "It boils down to this, and I'll admit it's an art," said Dan. "You've got to make the boy you're dancing with think you're sorry that someone is cutting in; and you've got to make the boy who's cutting in think you're glad."
    Jane said that sounded insincere to her, and she believed a girl always should be sincere, didn't Mother.
    Mother thought that one was safe enough.
    "Yes indeed, dear," she said, coming out from behind her book. "It's a mistake to be hypocritical."
    "Of course you should be sincere," Fred agreed. "But you can be glad and sorry at the same time, can't you? Like when you graduated from Junior High?"
    "Sorry to leave those infants?" Jane laughed condescendingly. "I was only glad then. But I guess I see what