She was not portraying the spirit
of the desert as gleaned from study and observation and melted in the
crucible of her poetic imagination and molded by her fancy until it was
a thing of form in her thought. The Black Pearl danced the desert
because in her was the power to be one with it and live in its life
through every cell of her being. It was a matter of feeling with her,
one phase of her affinity with the forces of earth; but because she had
the artist's constructive imagination, she could put it into form and
dance it, and by projecting her own feeling into it, convey it to
others.
The world with its round of outworn, hackneyed appeals, its wearisome
repetitions of crude and commonplace joys, its tawdry and limited
temptations, had long ago fallen away from Seagreave--and left him
nothing, but to-night a voice that he had long ignored, the voice of
life, commanded him.
"If the desert seems forever to claim her own, what is that to you! Your
work is to reclaim and in the face of a thousand defeats and desolations
still to reclaim, with the eternal faith that for you the wastes shall
blossom like the rose. Work, no matter how brokenly, how futilely. To
build houses of sand is better than to sit in profitless dreams and live
in an animal content."
When later he drove Pearl up the mountainside, almost in silence, as
they had come, after his few words of admiration and appreciation of her
dancing, there was a shadow for the first time in Harry's clear eyes, a
shadow which did not pass.
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