He also dedicated two issues of his magazine ‘To My Wife’, giving those two words triple underlining and an exclamation mark in number 6.59 Who ten-year-old Tom’s wife was we may never know. The boy’s ‘inamoratae’ around this time or a little later included his freckled, athletic contemporary Margaret Lionberger, daughter of St Louis millionaire attorney, Isaac H. Lionberger, whose Henry Hobson Richardson-designed mansion at 3630 Grandel Square assuredly outclassed Tom’s Locust Street home. Where the Eliots stayed put, the Lionbergers moved several times to more and more upscale neighbourhoods.60

Other local girls Tom had his eye on included Jane Jones (readily remembered decades later); Effie Bagnall ‘whose family were considered distinctly nouveaux riches’, probably because their money came from that newfangled thing an electricity company; and ‘the reigning beauty of the dancing school: Edwine Thornburgh herself, who subsequently became Lady Peek of Peek Frean & Co Ltd.’61 Tom met these fledgling eligibles from ‘St Louis’s smart set’ at Professor Jacob Mahler’s Dancing Academy, 3545 Olive Street, today the site of St Louis’s Centene Center.62 His parents consigned him to this Dancing Academy, often to his great discomfort: ‘how I dreaded those afternoons, and my shyness’.63

Girls who danced with him in St Louis were struck by his shyness, and by his unreconfigured ears – that continuing source of embarrassment. Margaret Shapleigh, whose brother was a classmate of Tom’s at Smith Academy, whose mother belonged to the Wednesday Club and whose doctor father lectured on ‘diseases of the ear’, called him ‘Big-eared Tom’. So did her friends. Though not among his ‘inamoratae’, she recalled dancing with him at a fancy-dress party when his outfit was rather different from his usual attire:

My clearest remembrance of him is when he was attending a ‘Farmers’ Party’ because everyone was in farmers’ costumes. I was a shy girl but on that occasion I saw (or thought I saw) my brother who from the rear looked exactly like every other boy (blue jeans, plaid shirt & huge straw hat). So being partnerless I tapped him on the shoulder and said ‘Hi, kid, let’s dance.’ The form turned around. It wasn’t my brother – just Tom turning redder than a turkey cock. I too was stunned – but we danced.64

Confronting and overcoming shyness, Tom danced in his boyhood and teens and grew to love it; twenty years later he would roll back the carpets of his London flat and foxtrot with his wife; he waltzed in old age. If dancing in St Louis brought him into contact with ‘inamoratae’, it also set a pattern. Just as he was interested in actresses, so he liked dancers. If he recalled his childhood in terms of shyness and being ‘protected from … sexual precocity’, he knew too that, for good and ill, his childhood had made him.65 At Professor Mahler’s and elsewhere, sometimes gauchely, it encouraged him to dance.

Tom remembered the Dancing Academy as deliberately ‘Select’, catering ‘for the jeunesse dorée [gilded youth] of St. Louis’.66 The Academy had its own printed ‘catalogue’ which could be mailed out to families wishing their children to attend.67 Each season, from October until March, the theatrically imaginative Professor – who also organised small children’s shows with ‘fairy drills and cupid marches’ – held a good number of dances at his house for local teenagers from the upper stratum of St Louis Society, as well as Saturday matinee events in his ballroom, typically including a ‘Valentine matinee’ and a ‘farmers’ party’ like the one at which Tom danced with Margaret Shapleigh.68 Jacob Mahler has been described as ‘a terpsichorean titan, despite his light, lithe build and despite the fact that he always wore velvet ballet slippers’.69 Well-off parents entrusted their children to this man’s care, confident that ‘the responsibility, the unseen but nevertheless unmistakable subtle refining influence, the ease of manner, and all the other essential things which go to make young people well bred are in the safest of hands when Mr. Mahler has the helm’.70

In his teaching Mahler was an enthusiast for the work of François Delsarte, the French theorist whose work influenced Isadora Duncan and who sought to relate mental to physical articulation, grounded in philosophy and theology.71 Idealistic in its conviction that ‘the artist needs an exactly-formulated definition of art’, the Delsarte System was just the sort of dancing that was appropriate for high-minded Lottie Eliot’s younger son.72 Though Tom liked some of the girls at Mahler’s, he disliked several of the boys. His ‘most loathed enemy’ was Atreus Hargadine von Schrader, Jr, who teased him mercilessly. When he was younger Atreus had lived nearby at 2648 Locust Street, but when Tom was nine the rich and ambitious von Schraders had moved away to more salubrious quarters.73

Soon so did another boy who aggravated him at Mahler’s dancing classes. Lewis Dozier, Jr, sang in the Smith Academy Glee Club and was a rival admirer of Edwine Thornburgh. Though shorter than Tom, Lewis exuded self-assurance that only heightened Tom’s shyness. In 1899 the Dozier family migrated to Westmoreland Place, arguably in Tom’s boyhood the city’s swankiest street.74 Mixing with these very rich kids, and coming from a prosperous family himself, the boy who wrote up in the Fireside ‘Miss Stockenbonds’, ‘Mrs Insessent Snob’ and ‘the Bondholder Fortunnes’ was able to make fun of social pretension in a milieu where ‘Miss Kamchatty de Havens gave a small tea of twenty covers.’75 From a very young age he was able both to participate in polite elite culture and to mock it. That mixture of impulses would be crucial to the poems of his first collection; it never left him.

He read constantly. Photographed aged eight, he hunches, engrossed in a book while sitting at an odd angle, one leg curled under him, on a rocking chair on the porch of the house at Gloucester. In a portrait in oils, painted by his art-student sister Charlotte about five years later, Tom sits formally upright on a dining chair. He is wearing what looks like a dark jacket and white bow tie, reading one of the red leather-bound volumes of the Temple Shakespeare edition which his mother had given him and which remained in his library all his life. Tom remembered how his ‘family advised or exhorted me to read’ approved works, ‘for they concerned themselves about my reading, and I remember my mother’s anxiety because I devoted too much attention to the novels of Mayne Reid – she tried to interest me in Macaulay’s History [of England] instead’.76

Unauthorised reading was exciting. Captain Mayne Reid, whose popular Victorian adventure stories included The Boy Hunters and The Forest Exiles or the Perils of a Peruvian Family amid the Wilds of the Amazon, was just the author to appeal to the St Louis lad whose Fireside contained such little tales as ‘Up the Amazon’, ‘Rattlesnake Bob’ and ‘“Pony Jim” by Dimey Novles’.77 Tom may have seen pieces such as ‘Up the Paraguay River’ in the Globe-Democrat.78 He had a taste for Mayne Reid-style adventures involving deserts and jungle locations, striking flora and fauna (the ‘humming-bird’ whose ‘throat … glitters’ in The Boy Hunters re-emerges as the ‘glitter’ of the ‘hummingbird’ in the 1930 poem, ‘Marina’), and accounts of rites such as that of the ‘“rain-maker”’ which are ‘the first dawning of religion on the soul of the savage’.79 These were tales Tom found for himself, some time after he had inherited from his older siblings the ‘beloved Rollo books’ authored around the time of his father’s birth by New England clergyman and educationalist Jacob Abbott.80 Abbott’s educational stories about a polite little American boy, who learns about the world and eventually travels abroad (Rollo in London, Rollo in Paris), were the genteel, approved counterparts of the adventures among supposedly primitive peoples offered by Mayne Reid. Tom absorbed the lot.

There were books at school, too, of course. In his second year at Smith Academy in 1899–1900 these included not just Edward Eggleston’s History of the United States and Its People, with its emphasis on ‘correctness’ and ‘clearness’, but also a more imaginatively alluring group of ‘English Classics’, including the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and a work entitled Legends of King Arthur.81 Probably this was a book by Thomas Bulfinch, but there is a similarly titled volume by Sir James Knowles; either way, here was Tom’s introduction to the legend of the quest for the Holy Grail which, reinterpreted by anthropological writer Jessie L. Weston, would play an important part in The Waste Land.

The boy worked assiduously.