lephants and camels parading in the distance.
The humps of the hills--some of them as high as eighteen hundred
feet--rose stately and green. Below, quite visible for a mile or more,
moved the dusty, white road descending to Stroudsburg. Out of her
Louisville earnings Mrs. Carter had managed to employ, for the several
summer seasons she had been here, a gardener, who kept the sloping
front lawn in seasonable flowers. There was a trig two-wheeled trap
with a smart horse and harness, and both Rolfe and Berenice were
possessed of the latest novelty of the day--low-wheeled bicycles, which
had just then superseded the old, high-wheel variety. For Berenice,
also, was a music-rack full of classic music and song collections, a
piano, a shelf of favorite books, painting-materials, various athletic
implements, and several types of Greek dancing-tunics which she had
designed herself, including sandals and fillet for her hair. She was
an idle, reflective, erotic person dreaming strange dreams of a near
and yet far-off social supremacy, at other times busying herself with
such social opportunities as came to her. A more safely calculating
and yet wilful girl than Berenice Fleming would have been hard to find.
By some trick of mental adjustment she had gained a clear prevision of
how necessary it was to select the right socially, and to conceal her
true motives and feelings; and yet she was by no means a snob,
mentally, nor utterly calculating. Certain things in her own and in
her mother's life troubled her--quarrels in her early days, from her
seventh to her eleventh year, between her mother and her stepfather,
Mr. Carter; the latter's drunkenness verging upon delirium tremens at
times; movings from one place to another--all sorts of sordid and
depressing happenings. Berenice had been an impressionable child.
Some things had gripped her memory mightily--once, for instance, when
she had seen her stepfather, in the presence of her governess, kick a
table over, and, seizing the toppling lamp with demoniac skill, hurl it
through a window. She, herself, had been tossed by him in one of these
tantrums, when, in answer to the cries of terror of those about her, he
had shouted: "Let her fall! It won't hurt the little devil to break a
few bones." This was her keenest memory of her stepfather, and it
rather softened her judgment of her mother, made her sympathetic with
her when she was inclined to be critical. Of her own father she only