A correspondent who recently dropped into the Taj Mahal Hotel when a dance was in progress, writes to the "Times of India" on the extraordinary sadness of modern dancing. "Here," he says, "were 20 or more couples of grown:
people, who. were doubtless under the delusion that they were enjoying themselves, gyrating slow-solemnly, with queer jerks and pressible sad countenances.
one not know otherwise, one would have said that one had tumbled into one of the many circles of torment in Hades, and that one was witnessing damned souls condemned to expiate by an eternity of sorrowful and painful movements orgies of dancing to which they had sinfully sold themselves on earth. One had to blink one's eyes, and pinch oneself, to realize that it was not so, but that one was viewing "one's fellow creatures indulging in the innocent relaxation of the Fox Trot." The correspondent reminds us of Marshal Petain who went to a London hotel to watch the dancing during his visit to England. He was asked his opinion. "C'est enatant," he replied. "Tes figures sent si tristes, et les derrieres si gales,"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.