My own chief feeling was of exultation, crowing over the hooded
city-folk, who think that drama and the tricks of colored light and
shade have led them to a glimpse of the hem of the garment of Unrest
--a cheap mean feeling, of which I was afterward ashamed.

Maga was not crowing over anybody. Neither did she only dance of
things her senses knew. The history of a people seized her for a
reed, and wrote itself in figures past imagining between the crimson
firelight; and the shadows of the cattle stalls.

Her dance that night could never have been done with leather between
bare foot and earth. It told of measureless winds and waters--of
the distances, the stars, the day, the night-rain sweeping down--dew
dropping gently--the hundred kinds of birds-the thousand animals
and creeping things--and of man, who is lord of all of them, and
woman, who is lord of man--man setting naked foot on naked earth
and glorying with the thrill of life, new, good, and wonderful.

One of the Turk's seven sons produced a saz toward the end--a little
Turkish drum, and accompanied with swift, staccato stabs of sound
that spurred her like the goads of overtaking time toward the peak
of full expression--faster and faster--wilder and wilder--freer and
freer of all limits, until suddenly she left the thing unfinished,
and the drum-taps died away alone.

That was art--plain art. No human woman could have finished it.
It was innate abhorrence of the anticlimax that sent her, having
looked into the eyes of the unattainable, to lie sobbing for short
breath in her corner in the dark, leaving us to imagine the ending