The Light Fantastic'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 14, 3 April 1902, Page 18

The Light Fantastic'

When you see that the fly is passing away, you know that winter is nigh and you renovate your dancing-pumps. It has always seemed strange to me how it is that young meu and women, who know for certain that they would drop dead in their tracks if they attempted to walk two miles to Mass on a Sunday, can worry through a whole evening's dances without even feeling tired. An expert tells us that an average waltz takes a dancer over something like three-quarters of a mile, and a square ' dawnce' makes him cover about half a mile. I don't know where the expert got his information. I fancy he tied a cyclometer or a theodolite to his leg and tried it himself. A girl, then, with a well-filled programme travels thus in one evening : Twelve waltzes, nine miles • four polkas and two quadrilles at half a mile apiece, three miles • total twelve miles. To this we should add, for the ladies, two' miles' representing the intermission strolls and the trips to the dressing room to renovate the complexion and jab in some extra hau-pins Grand total, fourteen miles. No wonder the Indian potentate in London asked why on earth/ the dancers didn't get their servants to do all that for them.

There are better things at a dance than gliding through ' the «\j' as Richard Swiveller would say. I attended the White _nd Bachelors' Ball just before Lent began. At one time during the evening I saw five young ladies sitting together in one part of the hall, and strutting up to these was the White Island Beau Brummel, washing his hands with invisible soap in impalpable water, and wearing- a smile that would make a plagued rat deliver himself up at the gas works without a pang. The five ladies spotted him, almost together. And the distant, dreamy, far away, unconcerned, don't-want-to-be-asked expression that spread itaelf over those five faces would lead one to believe that their five owners had no other pursuit in life than demonstrating the binocular parallax of the gas jet. Mr. Brummel bowed to one of them, and wanted to know 'could he have the pleasure of having a dance, to. 1 She must have refused, because the bankrupt smile ithat quivered on the poor man's lips as he want ouUiis to sea if it was going to rain was so perplexing that, for the moment, I really couldn't tell by it whether he had bitten his tongue, or had just heard of the death of his only mother. You know how you feel when you are parsing up the mid He of a big drapjry establishment and hear the ladies behind the counters coughing to one another. That is how he mu^t have felt. An iii was better than a dance to see him.