ngularly free from sex consciousness--and yet
was it? She was conscious of her body--of every inch of it--under the
ivory-white clothes which she frequently wore. Once she wrote in a
secret diary which she maintained--another art impulse or an
affectation, as you will: "My skin is so wonderful. It tingles so with
rich life. I love it and my strong muscles underneath. I love my hands
and my hair and my eyes. My hands are long and thin and delicate; my
eyes are a dark, deep blue; my hair is a brown, rusty red, thick and
sleepy. My long, firm, untired limbs can dance all night. Oh, I love
life! I love life!"

You would not have called Berenice Fleming sensuous--though she
was--because she was self-controlled. Her eyes lied to you. They lied
to all the world. They looked you through and through with a calm
savoir faire, a mocking defiance, which said with a faint curl of the
lips, barely suggested to help them out, "You cannot read me, you
cannot read me." She put her head to one side, smiled, lied (by
implication), assumed that there was nothing. And there was nothing,
as yet. Yet there was something, too--her inmost convictions, and
these she took good care to conceal. The world--how little it should
ever, ever know! How little it ever could know truly!

The first time Cowperwood encountered this Circe daughter of so
unfortunate a mother was on the occasion of a trip to New York, the
second spring following his introduction to Mrs. Carter in Louisville.
Berenice was taking some part in the closing exercises of the Brewster
School, and Mrs. Carter, with Cowperwood for an escort, decided to go
East. Cowperwood having located himself at the Netherlands, and Mrs.
Carter at the much humbler Grenoble, they journeyed together to visit
this paragon whose picture he had had hanging in his rooms in Chicago
for months past. When they were introduced into the somewhat somber
reception parlor of the Brewster School, Berenice came slipping in
after a few moments, a noiseless figure of a girl, tall and slim, and
deliciously sinuous. Cowperwood saw at first glance that she fulfilled
all the promise of her picture, and was delighted. She had, he
thought, a strange, shrewd, intelligent smile, which, however, was
girlish and friendly. Without so much as a glance in his direction she
came forward, extending her arms and hands in an inimitable histrionic
manner, and exclaimed, with a practised and yet natural inflection:
"Mo