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ed. 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 wi