anifestations of them in this class, it is the feverish
abandonment into which drink and other excitements have driven them. It
is not often that a common bawd, without brains or beauty enough to
attract a passing glance, thus has the opportunity to elicit volleys of
applause from crowds of men; and, without stopping to question the value
of it, she makes herself doubly drunken with it. If to kick up her
skirts is to attract attention--hoop la! If indecency is then the
distinguishing feature of the evening, she is the woman for your money.
So she jumps rather than dances. She has a whole set of lascivious
motions, fashioned quickly, which outdo the worst imaginings of the
dirty-minded men who applaud her. She springs upon the backs of the men,
she swaggers, she kicks off hats. She is a small sensation in herself,
and feels it, and goes about with a defiant and pitiless recklessness,
reigning for the few brief hours over the besotted men who feel a fiend's
satisfaction in the unnatural exhibition.

"To particularize to any greater extent would be to make public the
habits and manners of the vilest prostitutes in their proper haunts,
where, out of the glare of publicity, they may, and probably do, perfect
themselves in the indecencies most likely to catch the eyes of men little
better than themselves, but which thus brought together under the
gaslight of the public chandelier is, to the healthy man, like the
application of the microscope to some common article of food then found
to be a feculent and writhing mass of living nastiness. That respectable
foreigners were induced to attend this ball by the representations made
by the managers is certain. That they were outraged by what took place
there, is beyond all doubt. To suppose a man deceived as to the
character of the entertainment, and to go there and mingle with masked
ladies, who for a while ape the deportment of their betters, is to
suppose a sensation for him at once startling; for when the richly
dressed ladies doff their masks, he finds himself surrounded by a ghastly
assemblage of all the most virulent social corruption in our
civilization; dowagers turn out to be the fluffy and painted keepers of
brothels; the misses sink into grinning hussies, who are branded on the
cheeks and forehead with the ineradicable mark of shame; and the warm and
coy pages, whom at the worst he might have supposed to be imprudent or
improvident girls, stare at him with the dea