the awful thought has already pierced some people's brains--what if
the man under thirty-five does not dance?

Sometimes an untrained man under thirty-five will actually have the
audacity to say to me that he takes small pleasure in society because
the girls he meets are so silly, and he must use small-talk in order
to meet them on their own ground. I am aghast at his temerity, as he,
too, will be when he has heard our side of the subject. We girls never
have allowed ourselves the luxury of vindicating ourselves, or
refuting this charge. It is the clever girl who suffers most of
all--not the brilliant, meteoric girl--but just the ordinarily clever
girl, as other girls know her. It is this sort of a girl who drags
upon my sympathies, because she occupies an anomalous position.

Being a real woman, she likes to be liked. She wishes to please men.
We all do. But what kind of men are we to please? Untrained men under
thirty-five? Owing to the horrible prevalence of these men, some girls
become neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. They see their
silly, pink-cheeked sisters followed and admired. They know either how
shallow these girls are or how cleverly hypocritical. Clever girls are
also human. They love to go about and wear pretty clothes, and dance,
and be admired quite as much as anybody.

The result is that they adopt the only course left to them, and,
bringing themselves down to the level of the men, feign a frivolity
and a levity which occasionally call forth from a thinking man a
criticism which is, in a sense, totally undeserved. What will not the
untrained man under thirty-five have to answer for on the Day of
Judgment!