power of electricity, its power
began to run along his veins, heating them, stirring them, calling
upon nerve and muscle and sense to wake up. He looked, and life
itself seemed to stream into him through his eyes. The girl's face
was a well-rounded oval, supported on the round, perfect column of
her throat; the eyes seemed pools of blackness that had caught all
the splendour and the radiance of a thousand Eastern nights. The
fires of many stars, the whole brilliance of the purple nights of
Asia were mirrored in them. Above them rose the dark, arching span
of the eyebrows on the soft warm-tinted forehead, cut in one line
of severest beauty with the delicate nose. Beneath, the curling
lips were like the flowers of the pomegranate, a living, vivid
scarlet, and the rounded chin had the contour and bloom of the
nectarine.

She smiled faintly as she met the fixed gaze of Hamilton's eyes
across the footlights--such an innocent, merry little smile it
seemed, not the mechanical contortions one buys with pieces of
silver. Hamilton's blood seemed to catch light at it and flame all
over his body. He sat upright in his seat: gone were his fatigue,
his thirst, his eye-ache. His frame felt no more discomfort: his
whole soul rushed to his eyes, and sat there watching. In some men
their physical constitution is so closely knitted to the mental,
that the slightest shock to either instantly vibrates through the
other and works its effect equally on both. Hamilton was of this
order, and his body responded, instantly now, to the joy and
interest born suddenly in his mind.

A moment after the curtain was rolled up, a huge negro, dressed in
a fancy dress of scarlet, and with a high cap of the same colour on
his head, came on from the side. In his hand he carried a small
dog-whip, and as he cracked it all the girls stood up. Hamilton
sickened as he looked at him: an indefinable feeling of horror came
over him as this man stalked about the stage. He pointed with his
whip to the two African girls at the end of the semicircle, and
they came forward, while the rest sat down. A horrid uneasy feeling
of discomfort grew up in Hamilton, similar to that which a lover of
animals feels, when called upon to witness performing dogs, and all
the fear and anxiety pent up in their fast-beating little hearts is
communicated to himself. He watched the girls' faces keenly as the
negro went round and placed himself behind the middle chair of the
semicircle, w