"But," some mothers say, "I know that I can trust my daughter. The waltz may be the means of leading astray some shallow, low-minded girls, and may arouse the lower nature of some of those whose lower nature lies very near the surface, but such girls would go astray anyway. My daughter is a pure, high-minded girl, and I am sure she is trustworthy." I am glad she is. Keep her so, my friend, _keep her so_. Do not risk making her otherwise by placing her under the greatest temptation that can possibly come to a girl. If you place her in the dancing academy or ball-room she cannot and will not remain what you say she now is, and she has but a comparatively small chance of escaping ruin--comparatively only a small chance, I say. It is a startling fact, but a fact nevertheless, that _two-thirds of the girls who are ruined fall through the influence of dancing_. Mark my words, I know this to be true. Let me give you two reasons why it is so. In the first place I do not believe that any woman can or does waltz without being improperly aroused, to a greater or less degree. She may not, at first, understand her feelings, or recognize as harmful or sinful those emotions which must come to every woman who has a particle of warmth in her nature, when in such close connection with the opposite sex; but she is, though unconsciously, none the less surely sowing seed which will one day ripen, if not into open sin and shame, into a nature more or less depraved and health more or less impaired. And any woman with a nature so cold as not to be aroused by the perfect execution of the waltz, is entirely unfit to make any man happy as his wife, and if she be willing to indulge in such pleasures with every ball-room libertine, she is not the woman any man wants for a wife. It is a noticeable fact that a man who knows the ways of a ball-room rarely seeks a wife there. When he wishes to marry he chooses for a wife a woman who has not been fondled and embraced by every dancing man in town. It is also noticeable that after marriage few men care to dance, or to have their wives dance.