There is, again, a very large class of dancers who frankly allow that there is immorality in the modern waltz, but insist that this immorality need not be, and by them is not, practised. They dance—but very properly, you know. These are the Pharisees who beat their breasts in public places, crying fie! upon their neighbors, and bravo! upon themselves.
Of course, they will tell you, there are persons who are excited impurely by the waltz, but these are persons who would be immoral under any circumstances. "To the pure all things are pure." It is astonishing how apt they are with these tongue-worn aphorisms. To the pure all things are pure,—yes, but purity is only a relative virtue whose value is fixed by the moral standard of the individual. What would be pure to some would be grossly impure to others, and when you place your wife or daughter in the arms of such salacious gentry as have been described in the foregoing pages are you not pretty much in the position of the gentleman who when gravely informed by a guest who was taking an unaccountably hasty leave that his (the host's) wife had lewdly entreated him, replied: "But, my friend, that is nothing; your wife did as much for me when I visited you last year." This gentleman, remember, was also ready to add: "to the pure all things are pure." The Waltz should assuredly have figured among the "pure impurities" of Petronius.
But even if it be allowed that a lady can waltz virtuously, I have already shown that in that case she must not dance well. And what a pitiful spectacle, surely, is that of a lady trying "how not to do it"—converting her natural grace into clumsiness in order that she may do an indecent thing decently, and remain
"Warm but not wanton; dazzled, but not blind."
But perhaps she cannot waltz. In that case how long will it take her to learn? Will not one single dance lower her standard of purity if her partner happens to be one of the adepts I have described?
"But," cries the fair dancer "you must remember that no lady will permit herself to be introduced to, or accept as a partner, any but a gentleman, who she is sure will treat her with becoming respect."
I will not stop to inquire what her definition of a "gentleman" is—-whether the most courteous and urbane of men may not be a most desperate roué at heart. The attitude and contact are the same in any case, and if it needs must be that a husband is to see his wife folded in the close embrace of another man, is it any consolation for him to know that her partner is eligible as a rival in other respects than his nimble feet—that he who is brushing the bloom from his peach is at least his equal? Can you stop to consider the intellectual accomplishments and social status of the man who has invaded the sacred domain of your wife's chamber? No—equally unimportant is it to you, who or what he may be—that has thus exercised a privilege reserved by all pure-minded women for their husbands alone.
But in this matter of the selection of the fittest the ladies have set up a man of straw, which I must proceed to demolish. In order that the lawless contact may be impartially distributed, and that no lady may be free to choose whose sexual magnetism she shall absorb, we have imported from across the water a foreign variety of the abomination, by which ingenious contrivance the color of the ribbon a lady chances to hold determines who shall have the use of her body in the waltz, and places her in the pitiable predicament of the "poore bryde" at ancient French weddings, who, as we read in Christen, "State of Matrimony," must "kepe foote with all dancers, and refuse none, how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude, and shameless soever he be."
Nor are even the square dances any longer left as a refuge for the more modest, for to such a pitch has the passion for this public sexual intimacy come, that the waltz is now inseparably wedded to the quadrille. Even the old fogies are sometimes trapped by this device. A quadrille is called and they take their places feeling quite safe. "First couple forward!" "Cross over!" "Change partners!" "Waltz up and down the centre!" "Change over!" "All hands waltz round the outside!" and before they know it their sedate notions are lost in the "waltz quadrille." It may be said that every arrangement of the dance looks to an "equitable" distribution of each lady's favors. It is a recognized fact that a lady dancing repeatedly with the same gentleman shows a marked preference thereby—and he is deemed rude and selfish who attempts to monoplize his affianced, or shows reluctance in resigning her to the arms of another.