secret flame he had kindled in the bosom of the girl he left
behind. Carrie was possessed of that sympathetic, impressionable
nature which, ever in the most developed form, has been the glory
of the drama. She was created with that passivity of soul which
is always the mirror of the active world. She possessed an
innate taste for imitation and no small ability. Even without
practice, she could sometimes restore dramatic situations she had
witnessed by re-creating, before her mirror, the expressions of
the various faces taking part in the scene. She loved to
modulate her voice after the conventional manner of the
distressed heroine, and repeat such pathetic fragments as
appealed most to her sympathies. Of late, seeing the airy grace
of the ingenue in several well-constructed plays, she had been
moved to secretly imitate it, and many were the little movements
and expressions of the body in which she indulged from time to
time in the privacy of her chamber. On several occasions, when
Drouet had caught her admiring herself, as he imagined, in the
mirror, she was doing nothing more than recalling some little
grace of the mouth or the eyes which she had witnessed in
another. Under his airy accusation she mistook this for vanity
and accepted the blame with a faint sense of error, though, as a
matter of fact, it was nothing more than the first subtle
outcroppings of an artistic nature, endeavouring to re-create the
perfect likeness of some phase of beauty which appealed to her.
In such feeble tendencies, be it known, such outworking of desire
to reproduce life, lies the basis of all dramatic art.

Now, when Carrie heard Drouet's laudatory opinion of her dramatic
ability, her body tingled with satisfaction. Like the flame
which welds the loosened particles into a solid mass, his words