she leaned out over them, bending her
dark brows toward him, immovable and intent. He did not know whether she
was alone there. To all appearance she was alone, for her face remained
fixed above her arms, and it was as if her eyes never once looked away
from him.

And under their gaze an exultation seized him and a fierce desire, not
only to exceed and to excel all other performers on the horizontal bar,
but to go beyond himself; beyond his ordinary punctual precision; beyond
the mere easy swing and temperate rhythm. Instead of the old
good-natured rivalry, it was as if he struggled and did battle in some
supreme and terrible fight. Each movement that he made fired his blood;
from the first flinging of his lithe body upward, and the sliding of its
taut muscles on the bar, to the frenzy of his revolving, triumphal,
glorious to behold. Each muscle and each nerve had its own peculiar
ecstasy.

And when he dropped from the high bar to the floor he stood tingling and
trembling and breathless from the queer violence with which his heart
threw itself about. So utterly had he gone beyond himself. And he knew
that his demonstration had not been quite so triumphal, so glorious as
he had thought it. There had been far too much hurry and excitement
about it. And Booty told him he was all right, but perhaps not quite up
to his usual form.

It was with the air of a conqueror that Ranny pushed his way through the
packed line of spectators in the gallery. It was with a crushed and
nervous air, as of some great artist, conscious of his aim and of his
failure, that he presented himself to Violet Usher, sliding slantwise
into the place she made for him.

It was as if she had known that he would come to her. They shook hands
awkwardly. And with the stirring of her body there came from her that
faint warm odor of violets.

"I didn't expect to see you here," he said, at last.

"Winny brought me; else I shouldn't have come."

She was very precise in making Winny responsible for her appearance. He
gathered that that was her idea of propriety.

"Well--anyhow--it's a bit of all right," he said. Then they sat silent
for a while.

And the girl's face turned to Ranny with a flying look; and it was as if
she had touched him with her eyes, lightly and shyly, and was gone. Then
her eyes began slowly to look him up and down, up and down, from his
bare neck and arms, white against the thin crimson binding of his
"zephyr," from his shoulders