The mention of Anna--the famous Pavlova--was at any rate topical, for the cult of the Russian Ballet was now at its height, and in his Almanack for 1913 _Punch_ exhibited the political and other public celebrities of the hour engaged in appropriate evolutions _à la Russe_. The "Bunny-hug" was very properly gibbeted in a scathing cartoon, and in his hints to social climbers _Punch_ suggests various styles of vulgar and inane dancing as a passport to notoriety. With laudable fairness he admits, in parallel illustrations, that the Tango of fact was a much less lurid thing than the Tango as painted by the fancy of Puritans; but the revival of afternoon dances and the fashion of "Tango teas" met with no approval, and in the cartoon "Exit Tango," early in 1914, _Punch_, rather prematurely perhaps, congratulated the "Spirit of Dancing" on the passing of "the tyranny of the dullest of nightmares." In one of the last of the references to the dancing craze in this period--February, 1914, to be precise--_Punch_ notes, as one of the reasons why the Tango was already _démodé_, the fact that matrons had taken to it with the utmost fury, after a preliminary stage of acute disapproval. In the words of one of the younger generation:-- Now we may watch our mothers, smiling and flushed and gay, Doing it, doing it, doing it--tangoing night and day. Stamping a Texas Tommy, wreathing a Grapevine Swirl, Gleefully Gaby Gliding, young as the youngest girl. We may not laugh at our mothers, for (between me and you) They can out-dance us often--get all our partners too. [Illustration: THE "BUNNY-HUG" MODERN YOUTH (to Terpsichore): "My hug, I think." MR. PUNCH: "My kick, I know!"] [Sidenote: _Matron v. Maid_] This, however, was no new thing. It was only the latest manifestation of a "movement" which runs right through the social history of the whole of this period, and which may be alternatively described as the Emancipation or the Apotheosis of Middle Age. The earliest references to the change link it up with the coming of the New Woman. For example, in 1894, in a "Song of the Twentieth Century," _Punch_ describes the man of the family as relegated to the shelf by his more energetic female relatives:-- Aunt Jane is a popular preacher, Aunt Susan a dealer in stocks, While Father, the gentlest old creature, Attends to the family socks.