"Than the drunkard lying in the gutter bears likeness to the elegant young man of fashion who takes his social sips from a silver goblet lined with gold at his mother's refreshment table," Marion said, interrupting her, and speaking with energy. "Yet you will admit that the one may be, and awfully often is, the stepping stone to the other." "It is true," Eurie said; "both are true. I never thought of it before, but there is no denying it." As for Flossy, she simply bowed her head, as one interested but not excited. "Then may I bring in one of my verses, 'Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and the widow in their affliction, and to keep himself _unspotted_ from the world.' Does that apply? If the world can carry this amusement to such depths of degradation, and if the elegant parlor dance is or _can_ be in the remotest degree the first step thereto, _are_ we keeping ourselves unspotted if we have anything to do with it, countenance it in any way? Don't you see that the question, after all, is the same in many respects as the card-playing one? We have been over this ground before. "Suppose we grant, for argument's sake, that not one of you is in danger of being led away to any sort of excess, and I should hardly dare to admit it in my own case, because of a verse in this same old book, 'Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall;' but if it _should_ be so, let me give you another of my selections--rather, let me read the entire argument." Whereupon she turned to the tenth chapter of First Corinthians and read St. Paul's argument about eating meat offered to idols, pausing with special emphasis over the words, "_Conscience, I say, not thine own, but of the other._" "Did I understand you to say, Eurie, that it is a very general belief among dancers that Christians are inconsistent who indulge in this amusement." "It is a provoking truth that there is. Don't you know, Ruth, how we used to be merry over the Symonds girls and that young Winters who were church-members? Well, they made rather greater pretensions with their religion than some others did, and that made us specially amused over them." "Then, Eurie, wasn't their influence unfortunate on you?" "I am not on your side, Mistress Wilbur. You should have more conscience than to keep me all the time condemning myself!"