al elements mingled in the long Southern oval and
the Slavonic modelling of brow and cheek-bone. The lips, serene and
passionate, deeply sunken at the corners and shadowed with a pencilling
of down, were the lips of Spain; all the mystery of the South was in the
grave and tragic eyes. Yet the eyes were cold; and touches of wild
ancestral suffering, like the sudden clash of spurs in the languors of a
Polonaise, marked the wide nostrils and the heavy eyelids and the broad,
black crooked eyebrows that seemed to stammer a little in the perfect
sentence of her face.

She subjugated and she appealed. Her adorers were divided between the
longing to lie down under her feet and to fold her protectingly in their
arms. Calf-love is an undying element in human-nature, a shame-faced
derogatory name for the romantic, self-immolating emotion woven from
fancy, yearning and the infection of other's ardour. Love of this foam
and flame quality, too tender to be mere aesthetic absorption in a
beautiful object, too selfless to be sensual, too intense to be only
absurd, rose up towards Madame Okraska and encompassed her from hundreds
of hearts and eyes. The whole audience was for her one vast heart of
adoration, one fixed face of half-hypnotized tenderness. And there she
stood before them;--Madame Okraska whom crowned heads delighted to
honour; Madame Okraska who got a thousand pounds a night; Madame Okraska
who played as no one in the world could play; looking down over them,
looking up and around at them, as if, now, a little troubled by the
prolonged adulation, patient yet weary, like a mistress assaulted, after
long absence, by the violent joy of a great Newfoundland dog; smiling a
little, though buffeted, and unwilling to chill the ardent heart by a
reprimand. And more than all she was like a great white rose that,
fading in the soft, thick, scented air of a hot-house, droops languidly
with loosened petals.

They let her go at last and she took her place at the piano. Her hands
fell softly on a group of dreamy ascending chords. Her face, then, in a
long pause, took on a rapt expectancy and power. She was the priestess
waiting before her altar for the descent of the god, glorious and
dreadful. And it was as if with the chill and shudder of a possession
that, breathing deeply, drawing her shoulders a little together, she
lifted her hands and played. She became the possessed and articulate
priestess, her soul, her mind, her passion lent t