Van Twiller had actually been very deeply interested--not in an
actress, for the legitimate drama was not her humble walk in life,
but--in Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski, whose really perilous feats on
the trapeze had astonished New York the year before, though they had
failed to attract Delaney and me the night we wandered into the up-town
theatre on the trail of Van Twiller's mystery.

That a man like Van Twiller should he fascinated even for an instant by
a common circus-girl seems incredible; but it is always the incredible
thing that happens. Besides, Mademoiselle Olympe was not a common
circus-girl; she was a most daring and startling gymnaste, with a
beauty and a grace of movement that gave to her audacious performance
almost an air of prudery. Watching her wondrous dexterity and pliant
strength, both exercised without apparent effort, it seemed the most
natural proceeding in the world that she should do those unpardonable
things. She had a way of melting from one graceful posture into another
like the dissolving figures thrown from a stereopticon. She was a
lithe, radiant shape out of the Grecian mythology, now poised up there
above the gaslights, and now gleaming through the air like a slender
gilt arrow.

I am describing Mademoiselle Olympe as she appeared to Van Twiller on
the first occasion when he strolled into the theatre where she was
performing. To me she was a girl of eighteen or twenty years of age
(maybe she was much older, for pearl powder and distance keep these
people perpetually young), slightly but exquisitely built, with sinews
of silver wire; rather pretty, perhaps, after a manner, but showing
plainly the effects of the exhaustive draughts she was making on her
physical vitality. Now, Van Twiller was an enthusiast on the subject of
calisthenics. "If I had a daughter," Van Twiller used to say, "I
wouldn't send her to a boarding school, or a nunnery; I'd send her to a
gymnasium for the first five years. Our American women have no
physique. They are lilies, pallid, pretty--and perishable. You marry an
American woman, and what do you marry? A headache. Look at English
girls. They are at least roses, and last the season through."

Walking home from the theatre that first night, it flitted through Van
Twiller's mind that if he could give this girl's set of nerves and
muscles to any one of the two hundred high-bred women he knew, he would
marry her on the spot and worship her forever.

The followi