t Suzanne's side stirred. Irena, holding the daggers
above her head, had sprung from the little platform and was dancing on
the earthen floor in the midst of the Arabs.

Her thin body shook convulsively in time to the music. She marked the
accents with her shudders. Excitement had grown in her till she seemed
to be in a feverish passion that was half exultant, half despairing. In
her expression, in her movements, in the way she held herself, leaning
backwards with her face looking up, her breast and neck exposed as
if she offered her life, her love and all the mysteries in her, to an
imagined being who dominated her savage and ecstatic soul, there was a
vivid suggestion of the two elements in Passion--rapture and melancholy.
In her dance she incarnated passion whole by conveying the two halves
that compose it. Her eyes were nearly closed, as a woman closes them
when she has seen the lips of her lover descending upon hers. And her
mouth seemed to be receiving the fiery touch of another mouth. In this
moment she was a beautiful woman because she looked like womanhood.
And Domini understood why the Arabs thought her more beautiful than
the other dancers. She had what they had not--genius. And genius, under
whatever form, shows to the world at moments the face of Aphrodite.

She came slowly nearer, and those by the platform turned round to follow
her with their eyes. Hadj's hood had slipped completely down over his
face, and his chin was sunk on his chest. Batouch noticed it and looked
angry, but Domini had forgotten both the comedy of the two cousins
and the tragedy of Irena's love for Hadj. She was completely under the
fascination of this dance and of the music that accompanied it. Now that
Irena was near she was able to see that, without her genius, there would
have been no beauty in her face. It was painfully thin, painfully long
and haggard. Her life had written a fatal inscription across it as
their life writes upon the faces of poor street-bred children the one
word--Want. As they have too little this dancing woman had had too much.
The sparkle of her robe of gold tissue covered with golden coins was
strong in the lamplight. Domini looked at it and at the two sharp
knives above her head, looked at her violent, shuddering movements, and
shuddered too, thinking of Batouch's story of murdered dancers. It was
dangerous to have too much in Beni-Mora.

Irena was quite close now. She seemed so wrapped in the ecstasy of the