-hall admissions is
considerable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages
thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.

In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number of
black-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark of
the dance-hall _habitue_, the girl who is dance mad and who spends all
her evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black because
light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.

An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler." This
is a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled
and untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after the
wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he
dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a
place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those
dance halls where they have had the best time.

The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a
sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. The
dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of
many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.

Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most brutally
evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of
chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It is
vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the
desire of men and women to associate together, and distorts that
instinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes,
especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their
pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The
position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat
her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy
does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very
readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of
chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward
course.

Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive
young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not
remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a
stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as
she finished gra