From the Ball-Room to Hell | Page 5

over the floor, they gaze into the eyes gloating over them and gleaming with a fury of lust. They allow words to be whispered to them which they would not listen to at any other time; listening now, they come closer still, and in response to a pressure of her hand, his arm tightens its clasp of her waist, and she, losing all restraint, yields herself to the evil passion of the moment. Thus the fury of lustful thought becomes mutual and is mutually enjoyed.
The second scene is in a summer house. Only four characters are required for this act. They are the four we have particularly noticed in the ball-room scene.
This, too, would be a pretty scene, if the pleasure of it were not spoiled for us by the evil we see in it and know may result from it. The summer house, covered with vines and flowers, is in a beautiful garden filled with shrubs and trees. The night is calm and cloudless, and the silvery moon looks sadly down upon the scene through the branches of the trees.
The girls have been invited to retire thither for rest and refreshment. The men have previously arranged with a servant for the refreshments, with plenty of old wine provided for their use, and now they urge the ladies to partake, saying they will feel refreshed and be sustained by it for the remainder of the evening.
After much coaxing and pleading they are induced to take a glass. This accomplished, the men feel that their object is as good as achieved. The wine soon has a visible effect upon the unaccustomed brain, and the girls are easily induced to drink more.
The third and fourth acts are only repetitions of the first and second, and the last and fifth takes place behind the scene. The curtain must fall between us and the going home scene in two hacks to which the half intoxicated girls have been conveyed by brutes in human form.
We only know that these girls are now unable to resist, if they were to try, the deed of shame their male companions are bent upon doing, in that closed carriage, whose driver has been ordered to go slowly, and we know what has taken place, as in after days we see these girls no more in respectable society, although their accomplices still appear as most elegant and highly respectable gentlemen, alias ball-room Apollos.
This tragedy, my friends, was acted out in real life, and is only a sample of hundreds and hundreds of cases of which I have had personal knowledge.
"But," some mothers say, "I know that I can trust my daughter. The waltz may be the means of leading astray some shallow, low-minded girls, and may arouse the lower nature of some of those whose lower nature lies very near the surface, but such girls would go astray anyway. My daughter is a pure, high-minded girl, and I am sure she is trustworthy."
I am glad she is. Keep her so, my friend, keep her so. Do not risk making her otherwise by placing her under the greatest temptation that can possibly come to a girl.
If you place her in the dancing academy or ball-room she cannot and will not remain what you say she now is, and she has but a comparatively small chance of escaping ruin--comparatively only a small chance, I say.
It is a startling fact, but a fact nevertheless, that two-thirds of the girls who are ruined fall through the influence of dancing. Mark my words, I know this to be true. Let me give you two reasons why it is so. In the first place I do not believe that any woman can or does waltz without being improperly aroused, to a greater or less degree. She may not, at first, understand her feelings, or recognize as harmful or sinful those emotions which must come to every woman who has a particle of warmth in her nature, when in such close connection with the opposite sex; but she is, though unconsciously, none the less surely sowing seed which will one day ripen, if not into open sin and shame, into a nature more or less depraved and health more or less impaired. And any woman with a nature so cold as not to be aroused by the perfect execution of the waltz, is entirely unfit to make any man happy as his wife, and if she be willing to indulge in such pleasures with every ball-room libertine, she is not the woman any man wants for a wife. It is a noticeable fact that a man who knows the ways of a ball-room rarely seeks a wife there. When he wishes to marry he chooses for a wife a woman who has not been fondled and embraced