Waltzing is a profane and vicious dance.  Always.  When it is prosecuted in the centre of a great crowd, in a dusty hall, on a warm midsummer day, it is also a disgusting dance.  Night is its only appropriate time.  The blinding, dazzling gas-light throws a grateful glare over the salient points of its indecency, and blends the whole into a wild whirl that dizzies and dazes one; but the uncompromising afternoon, pouring in through manifold windows, tears away every illusion, and reveals the whole coarseness and commonness and all the repulsive details of this most alien and unmaidenly revel.  The very pose of the dance is profanity.  Attitudes which are the instinctive expression of intimate emotions, glowing rosy-red in the auroral time of tenderness, and justified in unabashed freedom only by a long and faithful habitude of unselfish devotion, are here openly, deliberately, and carelessly assumed by people who have but a casual and partial society-acquaintance.  This I reckon profanity.  This is levity the most culpable.  This is a guilty and wanton waste of delicacy.

That it is practised by good girls and tolerated by good mothers does not prove that it is good.  Custom blunts the edge of many perceptions.  A good thing soiled may be redeemed by good people; but waltz as many as you may, spotless maidens, you will only smut yourselves, and not cleanse the waltz.  It is of itself unclean.

There were, besides, peculiar desagrements on this occasion.  How can people,—­I could not help saying to myself,—­how can people endure such proximity in such a sweltering heat?  For, as I said, there was no illusion,—­not a particle.  It was no Vale of Tempe, with Nymphs and Apollos.  The boys were boys, appallingly young, full of healthful promise, but too much in the husk for exhibition, and not entirely at ease in their situation,—­indeed, very much not at ease,—­unmistakably warm, nervous, and uncomfortable.  The girls were pretty enough girls, I dare say, under ordinary circumstances,—­one was really lovely, with soft cheeks, long eyelashes, eyes deep and liquid, and Tasso’s gold in her hair, though of a bad figure, ill set off by a bad dress,—­but Venus herself could not have been seen to advantage in such evil plight as they, panting, perspiring, ruffled, frowsy,—­puff-balls revolving through an atmosphere of dust,—­a maze of steaming, reeking human couples, inhumanly heated and simmering together with a more than Spartan fortitude.

It was remarkable, and at the same time amusing, to observe the difference in the demeanor of the two sexes.  The lions and the fawns seemed to have changed hearts,—­perhaps they had.  It was the boys that were nervous.  The girls were unquailing.  The boys were, however, heroic.  They tried bravely to hide the fox and his gnawings; but traces were visible.  They made desperate feint of being at the height of enjoyment and unconscious of spectators; but they had much modesty, for all that.  The girls threw themselves into it pugnis et calcibus,—­unshrinking, indefatigable.