it.

I knew for his sake I could do anything.

His soul was drowning, and I had to save it even though I saved it for some one who seemed to me so evil. During the few moments that had elapsed my soul had gone through a mortal conflict. My own desire, my new knowledge, my new feeling of age, had struggled with the absolute necessity of helping him and giving him the thing he wished for most. I knew I could have comforted him, and that my comforting would have been sweet and perhaps in the days that followed he might have seen the woman in the child.

Still, I took the letter, and with an exaltation that can be born only of mortal pain I went to her.

She was sitting under an electric light on the piazza looking wonderfully pretty, with a fantastic background of black and green vines behind her. I've forgotten what I said to her, but the faint mockery of her first greeting changed to gravity, and gravity to something almost like tenderness as I talked. She took the letter and read. She read it gravely, and there was both triumph and sweetness in her expression triumph, I suppose, in the depth of affection she had aroused, sweetness because its depth had suddenly touched some depth in her that had never before been stirred.

"Tell him to come to me," she said, and I fled back through the night.

When I brought him the tidings, he looked at me with new eyes, and for a moment our souls stood out naked before each other.

"Wonderful little girl!" he said, and kissed me, and sped away as though he had seen a vision of everlasting joy, and I was left alone in my fiery and terrible exaltation.

I lived through more emotion those weeks and that night than I did in many years that followed. For many years all other emotions seemed pale to me and without meaning. I had seen Love, that terrible and devastating god, face to face. I had gone through the dolorous stations of the cross to a supreme sacrifice. I had seen the possibility of possession, and had thrown it from me so that my beloved might have his heart's desire.

From that moment Rose and he were always together. Soon the summer was

at an end, and Rose went away back to the city. Paul was called home suddenly.

With his departure came to me the terrible knowledge that I did not know where he lived. I knew his city, how he turned up his street, how his sisters looked; the room in which he lived would have seemed to me a familiar place. I could have called to his dog in a voice that the dog would have known, but in the hurry of his departure he had forgotten to give me his address. The worst of it was that he sent me several postals and one sweet little letter, but all without addresses. I had seen him off, and stood on the platform waving to him as long as the train was in sight.

The world was full of Paul to me. Years afterward, whenever I found myself in a crowd, my eyes searched for him.

I waited through that winter and through the spring for the return of Rose. At last in early summer I saw her walking down the street. I joined her. We talked of this and that, but Paul's name never came up. At last, with my heart beating so painfully that I could hardly speak the words, I said: "Is Paul coming back?"

"Paul? Oh, to be sure," she answered. "I'd forgotten all about him! How should I know if Paul 's coming back?"

"Are n't you going to marry him?" I gasped.

She gave an affected little laugh.

"When you are older, my dear," she said patronizingly, "you'll know you don't marry every nice boy you have a little flirtation with in summer. He came to see me two or three times, and then because I would n't do every little thing he wanted me, he got angry, and I sent him away for good."

I looked at her. As she talked I had grown, not old, but mature. I judged her as a woman half a dozen years her senior might have judged her, and saw her as she was, pretty, artificial, cheap, a shallow child. I saw her as Paul might have seen her at the end of his disillusion. I had lost my Paul and gone through my fiery ordeal for this, just because I was a little girl, just because I was not old enough, just because I had been so young a girl that all older girls seemed wonderful to Poor Rose! Now I knew she had not depth enough to be evil.

me.

That sense of comedy that is worse than

any tragedy assailed me. A desire for laughter arose in me and choked me.

I managed to ask her where Paul lived. I faltered forth some pale excuse of his having left some of his things in our house, but she no longer knew where he lived. He had moved. She left me with all the flowers of my spirit withered.

There seemed to me only blackness ahead. Through the loneliness and despair which followed my dear mother walked beside me; my hand lay in hers. She was at peace, she was glad I was "developing normally." She rejoiced that I was n't one of those girls who are "boycrazy." No, I was n't boy-crazy, for I had walked too young through those grave and somber portals of supreme sacrifice. I had felt too soon the loss and loneliness of all that is best in life to be "boy-crazy."

I who had loved, how could I care for lesser loves? Love came to me then, and never again did I feel the great and overwhelming delight of life.

Not even when I married did love in its great and overwhelming fullness return to me. I know now that I was not alone in my loneliness. I know that there walked beside me other children carrying hidden burdens, some who even carried the terrible burden of shame.

When I see them walking from school I must always wonder, "Which are you, a child at play or a child with a woman's heart, and has love already laid its heavy burden on your fragile shoulders?"

We cannot know. They will not tell us. They have no words in which to do it if they would, for the desires of their hearts are shyer than shy birds.

IT

T would be possible to multiply indefinitely evidences that the practice of dancing has already received too much and too serious attention to be put by as a mere fashion. The increasing number and success of performances by great dancing troupes speak for, themselves. Any one who habitually attended the great performances in the last two years was impressed by the growing taste and discernment on the part of audiences. We are yet far from being a nation of connoisseurs, but in two short years we have learned to see many a subtle beauty that used to pass over our heads; also, we now regard with indifference a multitude of tricks that pertain less to the artist than to the showman, and not long ago used to be sure means of applause. In response to this discrimination, note the effect on the fashion in cabaret dancing: within less than a year it has changed radically in the direction of genuine beauty.

The great dancing seen by the general public by no means measures the extent of its performance. The entertainments of the rich are hardly complete without a dancing program, and that of a high grade of merit. Newport, seeking beautiful and sumptuous entertainment, has revived the ballet masque, a chorographic form that delighted Europe through more than three centuries. And, as nobility long danced

side by side with the professional artist employed to "key up" these affairs, so a strengthening mode encourages the woman of fashion to bring in the professional dancer to keep up the standard of her entertainments.

The dance, as a matter of history, has been a conspicuous and invariable factor in the social life of every period of creative thought. So intimate has been the association between it and thought activity, indeed, that the genuineness of the present intellectual awakening might be doubted if a powerful and active interest in dancing was not a part of it. To characterize the present renaissance as a "fad" or a "craze" is to ignore chapters of social history.

If we may infer anything from literary, sculptural, and ceramic records, dancing was no less popular in the Athens of the golden age than it is now in America and western Europe. If Plato should come, to America to-day, he could find nothing to surprise him in the wide-spread popularity of the dance. It is probable, however, that he would be puzzled by our contentment with the meager variety of our steps and chorographic sentiments, and shocked by our poverty of stable institutions for the cultivation and protection of the dance as an art. Greek municipalities of any consequence had their endowed

theaters, with their corps of mimetic dancers as important factors in dramatic interpretation.

As a popular practice, throughout the history of the world, the dance has had seemingly as many forms as there are varieties of sentiment in the human heart. As a means to health and beauty of carriage and movement, philosophers emphasized its importance in education. The Spartan Lycurgus urged it upon boys and girls, men and matrons, as an important factor in national vitality; to the army he prescribed it as a part of routine exercise. There were dances sacred to various divinities, dances for social pastime, for grief, and for thanksgiving. Important events were celebrated by municipal ballet pageants. The dance solemnized funerals, gladdened banquets, caught pennies on the street. Nor did its popularity exceed its beauty. The grace and style with which Greece endowed it are recorded in a wealth of statuettes and ceramic decoration still extant. From the same sources it is to be inferred without uncertainty that it was rich in step as well as in posture. In short, the dancing of the Greek, like his other arts, was a concrete expression of the easy precision and rich individuality of his mind.

Rome's early progress had been accomplished in circumstances of vigorous, but artistically sterile, simplicity. Her subsequent material prosperity was accompanied by cerebral decay. In the early centuries of enforced simplicity of life Rome's dancing was principally religious and of a martial severity. The Lupercalia and the Saturnalia, of evil fame in latter days, originated as religious observances. As the spoils of conquest began to enrich the state and those in control, simplicity fled. Naturally, therefore, as the republic drifted toward the conditions of empire, we find the populace increasingly dependent upon public spectacles for amusement, and sullen when left to its own resources. The rich, too, required external stimuli to emotion, and those of a kind requiring little aid from imagination. They had no critical standards. They wanted to be amused. A society without appreciation of beauty finds amusement only in novelty, and that of a character in conformity with society's dominant taste. Melodramatic sensation or obscenity were ingredients that the

Roman patrician found desirable in his exhibition dancing.

The practice of independent thought the Roman had exchanged for a code of fashion, which dominated his intellectual and esthetic life as it dictated his actions. Pompeii, his Newport, took up Greek wall decoration as a fashion. Things were done and avoided for the sake of form and appearance; Horace's branding-iron left its mark of ridicule on many an inept transgressor of arbitrary and inconsequential social usage. Propriety appeared. Dancers from Cadiz and Syria, having debased their work into conformity with Roman patrician taste in order to make their living, were written down as improper people. Society's attitude toward participation in dancing is indicated in a line of Sallust, "She dances too well for a virtuous woman." On the other hand, it seems that one might take part without serious loss of social caste in celebrations of the Lupercalia and the Saturnalia, despite their frank degeneration into orgies of sensuality.

In the dark ages, following the collapse of the Roman empire, the art of dancing seems to have been forgotten except by Spain, so detached by the Pyrenees from the rest of Europe that its influence was minimized, and by the church. The latter, having a Romanized public taste to deal with, became involved in a series of seeming inconsistencies. Church dignitaries, for instance, at various times proscribed all dancing, while at no time did the art wholly lose its place in the ritual of worship. The Bible, with its expressions of high respect for the dance; the ritualistic. use of dancing by the ancient Hebrews; St. Basil, with his recorded opinion that dancing furnishes the occupation of the angels-all such authority had weight. The brutalized medieval, however, was not to be trusted not to soil the art, in turn to be soiled by it. Toward the close of the dark ages, then, we find the church preaching doctrines calculated to depress the livelier sentiments, and in general discouraging dancing among the laity, while at the very same time using dancing as an important factor in evangelistic work. The latter took a dramatic form of allegory known as the morality. Ballet pantomime was found to be an effective wedge into imaginations and intelligences of all grades.