"Lead us not into temptation."
Yet this is done—is permitted by very many of our so-called "prudent parents" and while they are crying out about "social evils," are doing all in their power to furnish recruits for the great army of the infamous.
Deliver us from evil."
There are two types of married ladies who practise, and of course enjoy, the waltz, and lest either might discover the portrait of the other and take offence that her own lovely face was not used to adorn these pages, each shall have a separate notice. They will probably have already recognized portraits of themselves in this volume, but the object here is more particularly to distinguish between the two.
The first of these we may safely call semi-respectable—she is so partly from necessity, partly from choice—from choice because she regards it as the "proper thing" that her husband should dance attendance while she dances something else, during the performance of which, the poet tells us,
"The fair one's breast
Gives all it can and bids us take the rest."
She has not yet quite reached that stage of shamelessness when she can carouse the entire night without some lingering regard for what Mrs. Grundy will say; besides this, she is not quite sure of her position, and does not know exactly how much her husband will bear. She is afflicted with a bare suspicion that his docile nature might be over taxed—that in the pigeon holes of his dull cranium might be found a desire to make it rather lively if too openly slighted. "Oh, no," she reasons, "take him along—his presence makes it all right—his smile gives sanction to all that may happen. When he is with me who dare complain?"
But the woman whom it would be my joy to describe, whose perfections surpass description, is moved by no such paltry considerations. She glories in an independence which scorns all such petty restraints. She it is whose insight into domestic politics descries the true position, "to go with her husband is a bore"—his very presence is a hindrance to a full and free exercise of all the privileges of the "Boston Dip." She can find it in her heart now to laugh at the ridiculous vow she made when playing that old-fashioned farce before the altar—the vow to "leave all others and cleave to him alone." How much pleasanter, surely, to cleave and cling to all others, and leave him alone. She may be "too ill" to attend with her husband; but let "Mr. Nimblefoot"—sprightly of heel and addled of brain—come along, with an invitation to attend a ball, and in a trice she so far recovers her declining health as to make such an elaborate toilet that
"Not Cleopatra on her galley's deck,