As a question of mere fact the answer is patent:  She will.  Dancing will be good for her; she will like it; so she is going to waltz.  But the question may rather be put—­to borrow phraseology current among her critics:  Had she oughter?—­from a moral point of view, now.  From a moral point, then, let us seek from analogy some light on the question of what, from its actual, practical bearings, may be dignified by the name Conundrum.

Ought a man not to smoke?—­from a moral point of view.  The economical view-point, the view-point of convenience, and all the rest of them, are not now in question; the simple question is:  Is it immoral to smoke?  And again—­still from the moral point of view:  Is it immoral to drink wine?  Is it immoral to play at cards?—­to visit theaters? (In Boston you go to some

                         harmless “Museum,”
  Where folks who like plays may religiously see ’em.)

Finally, then—­and always from the same elevated view-point:  Is it immoral to waltz?

The suggestions here started will not be further pursued in this place.  It is quite pertinent now to note that we do smoke 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.