He was kneeling, his hands were stretched out, his head was bowed, and he was praying.  And, while he prayed, Liberty stood by him smiling, and her fiery cymbals were like the aureoles that illumine the beautiful faces of the saints.

For some reason that she could not understand her heart began to beat fast, and she felt a burning sensation behind her eyes.

She thought that this extraordinary music, that this amazing dance, excited her too much.

The white bundle at Suzanne’s side stirred.  Irena, holding the daggers above her head, had sprung from the little platform and was dancing on the earthen floor in the midst of the Arabs.

Her thin body shook convulsively in time to the music.  She marked the accents with her shudders.  Excitement had grown in her till she seemed to be in a feverish passion that was half exultant, half despairing.  In her expression, in her movements, in the way she held herself, leaning backwards with her face looking up, her breast and neck exposed as if she offered her life, her love and all the mysteries in her, to an imagined being who dominated her savage and ecstatic soul, there was a vivid suggestion of the two elements in Passion—­rapture and melancholy.  In her dance she incarnated passion whole by conveying the two halves that compose it.  Her eyes were nearly closed, as a woman closes them when she has seen the lips of her lover descending upon hers.  And her mouth seemed to be receiving the fiery touch of another mouth.  In this moment she was a beautiful woman because she looked like womanhood.  And Domini understood why the Arabs thought her more beautiful than the other dancers.  She had what they had not—­genius.  And genius, under whatever form, shows to the world at moments the face of Aphrodite.

She came slowly nearer, and those by the platform turned round to follow her with their eyes.  Hadj’s hood had slipped completely down over his face, and his chin was sunk on his chest.  Batouch noticed it and looked angry, but Domini had forgotten both the comedy of the two cousins and the tragedy of Irena’s love for Hadj.  She was completely under the fascination of this dance and of the music that accompanied it.  Now that Irena was near she was able to see that, without her genius, there would have been no beauty in her face.  It was painfully thin, painfully long and haggard.  Her life had written a fatal inscription across it as their life writes upon the faces of poor street-bred children the one word—­Want.  As they have too little this dancing woman had had too much.  The sparkle of her robe of gold tissue covered with golden coins was strong in the lamplight.  Domini looked at it and at the two sharp knives above her head, looked at her violent, shuddering movements, and shuddered too, thinking of Batouch’s story of murdered dancers.  It was dangerous to have too much in Beni-Mora.