"Then the question is, how much is one soul worth? I don't feel prepared to estimate it, do you?" To which question Ruth made no reply "There is another point," Marion said. "You young ladies talk about being careful with whom you dance. Don't you accept the attentions of strange young gentlemen, who have been introduced to you by your fashionable friends? Take Mr. Townsend, the young man who came here a stranger, and was introduced in society by the Wagners, because they met him when abroad. Didn't you dance with him, Eurie Mitchell?"
"Dozens of times," said Eurie, promptly.
"And Flossy, didn't you?"
Flossy nodded her golden head.
"Well, now you know, I suppose, that he has proved to be a perfect libertine. Honestly, wouldn't you both feel better if he had never had his arm around you?"
"Marion, your way of saying that thing is simply disgusting!" Ruth said, in great heat.
"Is it my way of saying it, or is it the thing itself?" Marion asked, coolly. "I tell you, girls, it is impossible to know whether the man who dresses well, and calls on you at stated intervals, looking and talking like a gentleman, is not a very Satan, who will lead away the pretty guileless, unsuspecting young girl who is worth his trouble; and the leading often and often commences with a dance; and the young girl may never have been allowed to dance with him at all had not stately and entirely unexceptionable leaders of society, like our Ruth here, allowed it first.
"It is the same question after all, and it narrows down to a fine point. A thing that can possibly lead one to eternal death, a Christian has no business to meddle with, even if he knows of but one soul in a million years who has been so wrecked. In all this we have not even glanced at the endless directions to 'redeem the time,' to be 'instant in season and out of season, to 'work while the day lasts,' 'to watch and be sober.' What do all these verses mean? Are we obeying them when we spend half the night in a whirl of wild pleasure?
"The fact remains that a majority of people are not temperate in their dancing; they do it night after night; they long after it, and are miserable if the weather, or the cough, keeps them away. I know dozens of such young ladies; I have them as my pupils; my heart trembles for them; they are just intoxicated with dancing; and they quote you, Ruth Erskine, as an example when I try to talk with them; I have heard them. Whether it is wrong for other people or not, as true as I sit here I can tell you this: I have two girls in my class who are killing themselves with this amusement, carried to its least damaging extreme, for they still think they are very careful with whom they dance; and you are in a measure, at least, responsible for their folly. You needn't say they are simpletons; I think they are, but what of it? 'Shall the weak brother perish for whom Christ died?'"
"Nell made a remark that startled me a little, it was so queer." Eurie said this after the startled hush that fell over them at the close of Marion's eager sentence had in part subsided. "We were speaking of a party where we had been one evening and some of the girls had danced every set, till they were completely worn out. Some of them had been dancing with rather questionable young men, too; for I shall have to own that all the gentlemen who get admitted into fashionable parlors are not angels by any means. I know there are several, who are supposed to be of the first society, that father has forbidden me ever to dance with.