Produced by Neville Allen, Malcolm Farmer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. VOLUME 98 FEBRUARY 15, 1890 * * * * * [Illustration] UNTILED; OR, THE MODERN ASMODEUS. "Très volontiers," repartit le démon. "Vous aimez les tableaux changeans: je veux vous contenter." _Le Diable Boiteux._ XX. Sweet odours, radiant colours, glittering light! How swift a change from the dusk sodden night Of London in mid-winter! _Titania_ here might revel as at home; Fair forms are floating soft as Paphian foam, Bright as an iceberg-splinter. Dianas doubtless, yet their frost holds fire; The snowiest bosom covers soft desire, And these are snowy, verily. As blanched--and bare--as Himalaya's peaks, Light-vestured as a troop of dancing Greeks. Waltz-measures ripple merrily. Merrily? Yes; the music throbs with mirth, Feet trip in time to it; yet what strange dearth Of glee midst all these graces! The quickening fire of spirit, passion, will, Seems scarce to move these dancing forms or thrill These irresponsive faces. The Shadow smiled. "True, yet not true," he said. "Good Form demands that men should look half dead, And women semi-frozen. Yet Nature lives beneath these modish masks Somewhere, sometimes, with energy that tasks Caste's rigid rule to cozen. "Pygmalion's prayer breathed life into the stone, But see yon graceful girl, with straitened zone And statuesque still bearing. You'd say in her the marble must invade The flesh, in so much loveliness arrayed, Such radiant raiment wearing. "Whirled in the waltz's formal maze by one Who might be a broad-cloth'd automaton, For any show of pleasure, She moves with drooping lids, and lips apart, And scarce a flush to show that a young heart Throbs to the pulsing measure." "Men meet to moon, and women whirl to wed, The cynic says. Is joy in life quite dead. Gladness in concourse banished From the parades of fashionable youth? Have maiden tenderness and manly truth From Vanity Fair quite vanished?" "Soft!" sneered the Shadow. "Questionings like these Sound _gauche_ and gushing. Better far to freeze To the right social zero, Than stoop to zeal and frank display of zest, Notes of the vulgar glories that invest The housemaid-novel's hero. "Nothing more useful than the surface-ice Of stiff stolidity. Vigour, aye, and vice, Therein find ready covert. Wickedness here may lurk, or even wit. Not to name happiness; but naught of it Is obvious and overt. "How bored they look, the slim stiff-collared boys! Energy that is eager and enjoys They may anon make show of In some less honest haunt; here as in pain They creak and crawl, devoid of that _sans gêne_ That virtue seems sworn foe of.