because we like it;
and do drink wine because we like it; and do waltz because we like it,
and have the added consciousness that it is a duty. I am sorry for a
fellow-creature--male--who knows not the comfort of a cigar; sorry and
concerned for him who is innocent of the knowledge of good and evil that
lurk respectively in Chambertin and cheap "claret." Nor is my compassion
altogether free from a sense of superiority to the object of
it--superiority untainted, howbeit, by truculence. I perceive that life
has been bestowed upon him for purposes inscrutable to me, though dimly
hinting its own justification as a warning or awful example. So, too, of
the men and women--"beings erect, and walking upon two [uneducated]
legs"--whose unsophisticated toes have never, inspired by the rosy,
threaded the labyrinth of the mazy ere courting the kindly offices of
the balmy. It is only human to grieve for them, poor things!

But if their throbbing bunions, encased in clumsy high-lows, be obtruded
to trip us in our dance, shall we not stamp on them? Yea, verily, while
we have a heel to crunch with and a leg to grind it home.

XI

LUST, QUOTH'A!

You have danced? Ah, good. You have waltzed? Better. You have felt the
hot blood hound through your veins, as your beautiful partner, compliant
to the lightest pressure of your finger-tips, her breath responsive,
matched her every motion with yours? Best of all--for you have served in
the temple--you are of the priesthood of manhood. You cannot
misunderstand, you will not deliver false oracle.

Do you remember your first waltz with the lovely woman whom you had
longed like a man but feared like a boy to touch--even so much as the
hem of her garment? Can you recall the time, place and circumstance? Has
not the very first bar of the music that whirled you away been singing
itself in your memory ever since? Do you recall the face you then looked
into, the eyes that seemed deeper than a mountain tarn, the figure that
you clasped, the beating of the heart, the warm breath that mingled with
your own? Can you faintly, as in a dream--_blase_ old dancer that you
are--invoke a reminiscence of the delirium that stormed your soul,
expelling the dull demon in possession? Was it lust, as the Prudes
aver--the poor dear Prudes, with the feel of the cold wall familiar to
the leathery backs of them?

It was the gratification--the decent, honorable, legal gratification--of
the passion for rhythm; t