venture to think, because he wishes to enjoy his reprehensible emotion,
and this can not coexist with muscular activity If the reader--through
either immunity from improper emotion or unfamiliarity with muscular
activity--entertains a doubt of this, his family physician will be happy
to remove it. Nothing is more certain than that the dancing girls of
oriental countries themselves feel nothing of what they have the skill
to simulate, and the ballet dancer of our own stage is icily unconcerned
while kicking together the smouldering embers in the heart of the wigged
and corseted old beau below her, and playing the duse's delight with the
disobedient imagination of the he Prude posted in the nooks and shadows
thoughtfully provided for him. Stendahl frankly informs us, "I have had
much experience with the _danseuses_ of the ---- Theatre at Valence. I
am convinced that they are, for the most part, very chaste. It is
because their occupation is too fatiguing."

The same author, by the way, says elsewhere

I would wish if I were legislator that they should adopt in France
as in Germany the custom of _soirees dansantes_. Four times a month
the young girls go with their mothers to a ball beginning at seven
o'clock, ending at midnight and requiring for all expense, a violin
and some glasses of water. In an adjacent room, the mothers perhaps
a little jealous of the happy education of their daughters play at
cards, in a third the fathers find the newspapers and talk politics.
Between midnight and one o'clock all the family are reunited and
have regained the paternal roof. The young girls learn to know the
young men, the fatuity, and the indiscretion that follows it, become
quickly odious, in a word they learn how to choose a husband. Some
young girls have unfortunate love affairs, but the number of
deceived husbands and unhappy households (_mauvaises menages_)
diminishes in immense proportion.

For an iron education in cold virtue there is no school like the
position of sitting master to the wall flowers at a church sociable, but
it is humbly conjectured that even the austere morality of a bald headed
Prude might receive an added iciness if he would but attend one of these
simple dancing bouts disguised as a sweet young girl.

IX

COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE

Nearly all the great writers of antiquity and of the medieval period who
have mentioned dancing at all have done so in terms of unmistaka