A more intelligent “scholar” whom I met confirmed a good deal of my collarless friend’s unfavorable account of
THE GENERAL MORAL TONE
of the assembly. He said he knew them all, and that they nearly all worked in different industrial establishments in the city, and that pleasure rather than lucre ruled their lives.
One young woman was calculated to attract attention in particular. Her face was colorless, with the exception of a slight flush that seemed to flicker over her sunken cheek. She was languid, and after each quick movement of the dance a quick little gasp escaped out of the faded rose of her lips. Everything betokened a life being extinguished by consumption’s chill embrace. She was an object for tender solicitude, but the burly curly-headed young ruffian who dragged her through the dance seemed not to be aware that a grisly guest was following at his heels to claim his partner for another scene than this.
I gathered from a remark made by one of the ladies that something had been going on of which I had not been cognizant. She whispered that “O’Brien was as drunk as Billy Bedam,” and investigation showed that quite a number, while not as drunk as the historical Mr. Bedam was in the habit of getting, were pretty well on. Having therefore seen enough to disgust me I left.
This perhaps is an unusually low type of the “school,” but the best is only a degree or two higher.
Most of the persons present were boys and girls born and reared in this Canada of ours. I am confident from what I have observed that these young women will become the wives of these or similar young men, and it is pitiable and humiliating to think that another generation of Canadians will grow up under the tutelage of such parents. Free schools are a failure if they cannot teach a man that squirting tobacco juice over your dancing partner’s shoulder is bad manners.
And yet parents permit their daughters to go to such places, and be dragged down to the level of the lowest, not only in actions and conversation, but in the habits of thought which such associations create.