Her violin finally tuned to her satisfaction, she bent her head to speak to the young man at the piano.  He turned to answer her, and for a moment his delicate, sad face was outlined against the wall behind him.  Then, with an emphatic little nod, he began to play and the woman lifted her violin and swung in with him.

The only virtue she possessed as a violinist was that she kept good time, but although it was extremely unlikely that any member of that audience recognized the fact, the boy was a musician by the divine right of gift, a gift bestowed at birth.  A wheezy old piano, and yet he drew from it sweet and thrilling notes; a hackneyed, cheap waltz measure, and yet he invested it with the glamour of romance.

A ripple stirred all those waiting people, as a wind stirs a field of wheat, a movement of settling and attention.  Hanson, who had been careful to secure a seat in the front row of chairs, was conscious that his heart was beating faster.

“This is where she whirls in through that door by the piano,” he muttered to himself with the acumen born of long knowledge of the stage and its conventions.  He had a swift mental vision of a graceful painted creature, all undulating movement, alluring smiles, twinkling feet and waving arms.  This passed with a slight shock as a girl entered the door by the piano, as he had foreseen, and walked indifferently to the center of the room, and then, without a bow to her audience, began, still with an air of languor and absorption, to take vague, sliding steps, gradually falling in with the waltz rhythm, but, even so, the movement was without any definite form, certainly not enough to call it a dance.

As she swayed about, listless, apparently indifferent to any effect she might be producing, Hanson had a full opportunity to study her, and, in that concentrated attention, the man and the manager were fused.  He was at once the cynical showman discounting every favorable impression and the most critical and disillusioned of audiences.

In this dancer he saw a woman who was like the desert willow and younger than he had supposed; straight and supple, with a body of such plasticity, such instant response to the directing will of its possessor as only comes from the constant and arduous exercises begun in early childhood.

“Been trained for it since she was born, almost,” was Hanson’s first unspoken comment.

She wore a soft, clinging frock of scarlet crepe.  It was short enough to display her ankles, slender for a dancer, and her arched feet in heelless black slippers.  In contrast to her red frock was a string of sparkling green stones which fell low on her breast.  Her long, brown fingers blazed with rings, and in her ears, swinging against her olive cheeks, were great hoops of dull gold.  Her black shining hair was gathered low on her neck, her unsmiling lips were scarlet as a pomegranate flower, and exquisitely cut; and the fainter, duskier pomegranate bloom on her oval cheeks faded into delicate stains like pale coffee beneath her long, narrow eyes.