Page:Modern Dancing (1914) Castle.djvu/46

Rh are easier in some respects and really prettier than rapid ones. The slower the steps, the more intricate the measures, and the more subtly dignified the tempo of the music, the wider range one has for painting songs without words, and the more gracefully one can use one's body.

There will, I suppose, always be a certain element among the younger set who like to romp on the floor as if it were a kindergarten play-room, but this element nowadays is small. People have altered the idea that only youth and dancing are synonymous; the gray-haired matron and the sedate man of affairs are seen dancing as often now as the younger generation. That in itself proves that dancing has attained a new value, for it offers something as grateful to the old and middle-aged as to the young. Moreover, I do not believe that our present dances are the last word. I think the shifting season will find us dancing variations not only of the slow Waltz, the Berlin, and the Oxford Minuet, but that the dances of to-morrow will be a modified form of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Minuet itself. At any rate, I think we will go back through the range of the stately steps, and will probably adopt the old rule that the man should touch only his partner's finger-tips as they tread the measures of the dance. In all this reconstruction the Tango