n
inexplicable superiority which brought her the feverish and exotic
attention of lesser personalities whose emotional animality found an
outlet in swinging a censer at her shrine.

A strange maiden, decidedly! Even at this age, when she was, as one
might suppose, a mere slip of a girl, she was deeply conscious of
herself, her sex, her significance, her possible social import. Armed
with a fair skin, a few freckles, an almost too high color at times,
strange, deep, night-blue, cat-like eyes, a long nose, a rather
pleasant mouth, perfect teeth, and a really good chin, she moved always
with a feline grace that was careless, superior, sinuous, and yet the
acme of harmony and a rhythmic flow of lines. One of her mess-hall
tricks, when unobserved by her instructors, was to walk with six plates
and a water-pitcher all gracefully poised on the top of her head after
the fashion of the Asiatic and the African, her hips moving, her
shoulders, neck, and head still. Girls begged weeks on end to have her
repeat this "stunt," as they called it. Another was to put her arms
behind her and with a rush imitate the Winged Victory, a copy of which
graced the library hall.

"You know," one little rosy-cheeked satellite used to urge on her,
adoringly, "she must have been like you. Her head must have been like
yours. You are lovely when you do it."

For answer Berenice's deep, almost black-blue eyes turned on her
admirer with solemn unflattered consideration. She awed always by the
something that she did not say.

The school, for all the noble dames who presided over it--solemn,
inexperienced owl-like conventionalists who insisted on the last tittle
and jot of order and procedure--was a joke to Berenice. She recognized
the value of its social import, but even at fifteen and sixteen she was
superior to it. She was superior to her superiors and to the specimens
of maidenhood--supposed to be perfect socially--who gathered about to
hear her talk, to hear her sing, declaim, or imitate. She was deeply,
dramatically, urgently conscious of the value of her personality in
itself, not as connected with any inherited social standing, but of its
innate worth, and of the artistry and wonder of her body. One of her
chief delights was to walk alone in her room--sometimes at night, the
lamp out, the moon perhaps faintly illuminating her chamber--and to
pose and survey her body, and dance in some naive, graceful, airy Greek
way a dance that was si