  Numerical simulations of QCD-like theories in which the number of flavors is
adjusted so that the beta function is very small, but confinement and chiral
symmetry breaking nevertheless take place, appear to reveal the presence of a
flavor-singlet scalar meson which can be as light as the pions. Because the
breaking of dilatation symmetry, quantified by the beta function, is small
relative to QCD, a possible explanation is that the scalar meson is a pseudo
Nambu-Goldstone boson associated with the approximate dilatation symmetry. We
use this observation to systematically develop a low-energy effective action
that accounts for both the pions and the "dilatonic" scalar meson. In order to
justify the power counting that controls the couplings of the dilatonic meson
we invoke the Veneziano limit, in which the number of
fundamental-representation flavors $N_f$ grows in proportion with the number of
colors $N_c$, while the ratio $N_f/N_c$ is kept close to, but below, the
critical value where the conformal window is entered.
