a few weeks have passed
before she is able to waltz well, and is surrounded by the handsomest
and most gallant men in the room, who flatter her until her head is
quite turned. She has entirely overcome her delicacy about being
embraced in public for half an hour by strange men. In fact she rather
likes it now. She wonders all day, before dancing school, if that
handsome man who dances so "elegantly" and says such nice things to her,
will ask her to dance with him to-night, and finds herself dreaming of
how delightful it would be to feel his arm about her.

The evening at last comes; the uninteresting square dances are gone
through with, and the music of the waltz begins. Her partner is the
Apollo of her day dreams. He presses her close to his breast, and they
glide over the floor together as if the two were but one.

When she raises her eyes, timidly at first, to that handsome but
deceitful face, now so close to her own, the look that is in his eyes
as they meet hers, seems to burn into her very soul. A strange, sweet
thrill shakes her very being and leaves her weak and powerless and
obliged to depend for support upon the arm which is pressing her to
himself in such a suggestive manner, but the sensation is a pleasant one
and grows to be the very essence of her life.

If a partner fails, through ignorance or innocence, to arouse in her
these feelings, she does not enjoy the dance, mentally styles him a
"bore," and wastes no more waltzes on him. She grows more bold, and from
being able to return shy glances at first, is soon able to meet more
daring ones until, with heart beating against heart, hand clasped in
hand, and eyes looking burning words which lips dare not speak, the
waltz becomes one long, sweet and purely sensual pleasure.

The more profitable things upon which she has been accustomed to spend
her time and thought, lose all attraction for her, and during the time
which intervenes between dancing school evenings, she feeds her romantic
passion on novels, unfit for any person to read, and which would have
been without special interest to her before she entered the dancing
school. She spends much thought upon those things which tend to develop
her lower nature, for "as a man thinketh, so is he." She has never
before had a thought she would not willingly express to her mother. But
now she thinks of and discusses with her girl friends of the dancing
school, subjects which she would shrink from mentioning to her