“I’d like to,” said RoBards. “You and Immy have run up so many bills at so many shops that I am almost afraid to walk the streets or open my mail.”
This always enfuriated Patty and it angered her now:
“Since you owe so much you can owe a little more. But we owe something to Immy. We must give a ball, and it must be a crack.”
“An orgy, you mean, if it’s to be like some of the others we’ve gone to. Is that the most honest way to present a daughter to the world?”
“You’re getting old, Mist’ RoBards!” Patty snapped. “Orgies was the name poor old Papa used to call the dances you and I went to in our day.”
The upshot of it was that Patty won. The choicest personages in town received an Alhambra-watered envelope containing a notice that Mr. and Mrs. RoBards would be at home in St. John’s Park that evening week. Patty sent cards also to a number of young men whom RoBards considered far beneath his notice; but they were asked everywhere because they could and would dance the tight polka, the redowa, the waltz, the German; they could and would play backgammon and graces, write acrostics, sit in tableaux, get up serenades, riding parties, sleighing parties—anything to keep females from perishing of boredom. They all dressed correctly and alike, parted their hair straight down the back, posed as lost souls and murmured spicy hints of the terrific damnations they had known in Paris. Some of them lived in twenty-shilling-a-week boarding houses and curled each other’s hair.
But they could and would dance instead of standing about like wooden Indians. Some critics said that the dancing in the American homes was faster and more furious than anything abroad, except at the masked balls in Paris where the girls were grisettes.
Some of the beaux won an added prestige by their cynicism. They spoke with contempt of the sex they squired. In fact, everybody said that the new generation lacked the reverence for women that had been shown in the better days. Some blamed the rapidly increasing wealth of the country with its resultant laxity of morals; some blamed the sensational novelists for their exposures of feminine frailties.
Mr. Thackeray, an English lecturer and novelist, whose “Vanity Fair” had been a ruthless picture of British wickedness in high circles, came in for no little rebuke.
In an article on the subject RoBards found him blamed for the attitude of “unfledged college boys who respect nothing in the shape of woman, and exult in his authority to throw overboard the slight remains of the traditionary reverence which inconveniently bridles their passions, and restrains their egotisms.”