of fans and an occasional whisper. Expectation interspersed with
gimcracks seems to be the programme. The greater part of the
dancing that I saw was done by boys and girls. It was pretty and
painful. Nobody dances so well as children; no grace is equal to
their grace; but to go into a hotel at ten o'clock at night, and
see little things, eight, ten, twelve years old, who ought to be
in bed and asleep, tricked out in flounces and ribbons and all
the paraphernalia of ballet-girls, and dancing in the centre of
a hollow square of strangers,--I call it murder in the first
degree. What can mothers be thinking of to abuse their children
so? Children are naturally healthy and simple; why should they
be spoiled? They will have to plunge into the world full soon
enough; why should the world be plunged into them? Physically,
mentally, and morally, the innocents are massacred. Night after
night I saw the same children led out to the slaughter, and as
I looked I saw their round, red cheeks grow thin and white, their
delicate nerves lose tone and tension, their brains become feeble
and flabby, their minds flutter out weakly in muslin and ribbons,
their vanity kindled by injudicious admiration, the sweet
child-unconsciousness withering away in the glare of indiscriminate
gazing, the innocence and simplicity and naturalness and childlikeness
swallowed up in a seething whirlpool of artificialness, all the
fine, golden butterfly-dust of modesty and delicacy and
retiring girlhood ruthlessly rubbed off forever before girlhood
had even reddened from the dim dawn of infancy. Oh! it is
cruel to sacrifice children so. What can atone for a lost
childhood? What can be given in recompense for the ethereal,
spontaneous, sharply defined, new, delicious sensations of a
sheltered, untainted, opening life?