Does the following sentence strike you as a little creepy? “In their floor-length gowns, up-dos and tiaras, the 70 or so young women swept past two harpists and into a gilt-and-brocade dining room at the lavish Broadmoor Hotel, on the arms of their much older male companions.” If so, that’s either because you’re not familiar with the new ritual of father-daughter “purity balls,” or maybe because you are. The NYT’s Neela Banerjee turns in a modest masterpiece of lifestyle reporting that manages to bring new insight to the much-covered — so to speak — subject of the chastity movement. “The graying men in the shadow of their glittering daughters were the true focus of the night,” observes Banerjee — it’s the fathers by whom, and maybe for whom, this ball is produced. “Loss tinged many at the ball,” she writes, noting the distinctly adult melancholy of the proceedings. And then this strange last line, worthy of Fitzgerald: “But one father took his two young daughters for a walk around the hotel’s dark, glassy lake.” Banerjee’s article is accompanied by a very good slideshow — make sure you see #4, the cross as Maypole around which the virgins dance, their worldly fathers at a remove.