limbs, her white arms and delicate ankles being adorned with
circlets of tiny, golden bells, which kept up a melodious jingle-
jangle as she moved. And now began the strangest music,--music
that seemed to hover capriciously between luscious melody and
harsh discord,--a wild and curious medley of fantastic, minor
suggestions in which the imaginative soul might discover hints of
tears and folly, love and madness. To this uncertain yet
voluptuous measure the glittering girl-dancer leaped forward with
a startlingly beautiful abruptness,--and halting, as it were, on
the boundary-line between the dome and the garden beyond, raised
her rounded arms in a snowy arch above her head, and so for one
brief instant, looked like an exquisite angel ready to soar upward
to her native realm. Her pause was a mere breathing space in
duration, ... dropping her arms again with a swift decision that
set all the little bells on them clashing stormily, she
straightway hurled herself, so to speak, into the giddy paces of a
dance that was more like an enigma than an exercise. Round and
round she floated wildly, like an opal-winged butterfly in a net
of sunbeams,--now seemingly shaken by delicate tremors as aspen
leaves are shaken by the faintest wind, ..now assuming the most
voluptuous eccentricities of posture, . . sometimes bending
wistfully toward the velvet turf on which she trod, as though she
listened to the chanting of demon voices underground, . . and again,
with her waving white hands, appearing to summon spirits downward
from their wanderings in upper air. Her figure was in perfect
harmony with the seductive grace of her gestures,--not only her
twinkling feet, but her whole body danced,--her very features
bespoke entire abandonment to the frenzy of rapid movement,--her
large black eyes flashed with something of fierceness as well as
languor; her raven hair streamed behind her like a dark spread