But when she came quite close to the flower, all fear suddenly seemed to drop away from her.  She hopped for joy and laughed—­she had been needlessly alarmed.  How could a fat, immobile spider squatting on a flower be dangerous to a creature with wings?  This part of her dance was so graceful, so full of droll, bubbling, childlike merriment, that the audience laughed tears of delight.

Now, however, a new phase of the dance began, introduced in a thoughtful strain.  Having danced herself to satiety and intoxicated herself with the flower’s perfume, Mara, with movements of agreeable fatigue, made as if to lay herself to rest, but delayed here and there to brush from her body something like the threads of a spider’s web, at first serenely and pensively, then with growing disquiet, which communicated itself to the onlookers.  The child paused, reflected an instant, and apparently was about to laugh at herself because of the fears that had arisen in her soul; but the next minute she paled with fright, and made a dexterous leap, as if to free herself from a trap.  Her blond hair tossed back in Maenadic waves turned into a flaming stream.  Her whole appearance evoked involuntary cries of admiration.

The flight began.  And now the theme of the dance was Mara’s entanglement in the threads the spider wove about her, which gradually choked her to death.  No dancer has ever executed such an idea with equal skill and fidelity.

The little creature freed her foot from the meshes, only to find her neck entwined; she clutched at the threads about her throat, only to find her hands entangled; she tore at the cobweb, she bent her body, she slipped away; she beat with her fists, she raged, and only enmeshed herself the more tightly in the horrible skein; finally she lay fast bound.  During this last phase of the dance, her artist audience stood there rigid, breathless, suffocating with a sense of horror.

It was not until nearly the end that Frederick von Kammacher felt that his fate was forever linked with this girl.  The feeling grew stronger during the few moments that remained before the conclusion of the performance.  The poison of infatuation came from the expression of her face.  He noted precisely how it forced its way into him and how his whole being suddenly grew sick.  When little Ingigerd Hahlstroem once more opened her eyes with a look of abysmal dismay, and fastened them in helpless inquiry upon the spider, calmly drinking her blood away, an inner voice seemed to command Frederick to become her compassionate knight, saviour, and protector.

VI

Since, in Fuellenberg’s opinion, Frederick von Kammacher was not sufficiently interested in the dancer, Ingigerd Hahlstroem, he mentioned several other recent Berlin celebrities also on the Roland on their way to the United States.  There was Geheimrat Lars, a man well-known in art circles, who often cast the deciding vote in purchases of works of art by the government.  He was going to America to visit museums, private and public, and study the art situation in general.  There was Professor Toussaint, an eminent sculptor, some of whose monuments had been erected in several German cities, chiefly Berlin, works done in a wishy-washy Bernini style.