Hence the college boy who has kept straight for eight months in the year is apt to wonder:  What is the use?  And the debutante who is curious for all the experiences her new liberty makes possible takes it for granted that an amorous trifling is the ordinary incident to masculine attention.

This is far from being mere theory.  It is a matter of common knowledge that recently the most prominent restaurateur in New York found it necessary to lock up, or place a couple of uniformed maids in, every unoccupied room in his establishment whenever a private dance was given there for young people.  Boys and girls of eighteen would leave these dances by dozens and, hiring taxicabs, go on slumming expeditions and excursions to the remoter corners of Central Park.  In several instances parties of two or four went to the Tenderloin and had supper served in private rooms.

This is the childish expression of a demoralization that is not confined simply to smart society, but is gradually permeating the community in general.  From the ordinary dinner-table conversation one hears at many of the country houses on Long Island it would be inferred that marriage was an institution of value only for legitimatizing concubinage; that an old-fashioned love affair was something to be rather ashamed of; and that morality in the young was hardly to be expected.  Of course a great deal of this is mere talk and bombast, but the maid-servants hear it.

I believe, fortunately—­and my belief is based on a fairly wide range of observation—­that the Continental influence I have described has produced its ultimate effect chiefly among the rich; yet its operation is distinctly observable throughout American life.  Nowhere is this more patent than in much of our current magazine literature and light fiction.  These stories, under the guise of teaching some moral lesson, are frequently designed to stimulate all the emotions that could be excited by the most vicious French novel.  Some of them, of course, throw off all pretense and openly ape the petit histoire d’un amour; but essentially all are alike.  The heroine is a demimondaine in everything but her alleged virtue—­the hero a young bounder whose better self restrains him just in time.  A conventional marriage on the last page legalizes what would otherwise have been a liaison or a degenerate flirtation.

The astonishingly unsophisticated and impossibly innocent shopgirl who—­in the story—­just escapes the loss of her honor; the noble young man who heroically “marries the girl”; the adventures of the debonaire actress, who turns out most surprisingly to be an angel of sweetness and light; and the Johnny whose heart is really pure gold, and who, to the reader’s utter bewilderment, proves himself to be a Saint George—­these are the leading characters in a great deal of our periodical literature.