Berenice Fleming, at the time Cowperwood first encountered her mother, was an inmate of the Misses Brewster's School for Girls, then on Riverside Drive, New York, and one of the most exclusive establishments of its kind in America. The social prestige and connections of the Heddens, Flemings, and Carters were sufficient to gain her this introduction, though the social fortunes of her mother were already at this time on the down grade. A tall girl, delicately haggard, as he had imagined her, with reddish-bronze hair of a tinge but distantly allied to that of Aileen's, she was unlike any woman Cowperwood had ever known. Even at seventeen she stood up and out with an inexplicable superiority which brought her the feverish and exotic attention of lesser personalities whose emotional animality found an outlet in swinging a censer at her shrine.
A strange maiden, decidedly! Even at this age, when she was, as one might suppose, a mere slip of a girl, she was deeply conscious of herself, her sex, her significance, her possible social import.
Armed with a fair skin, a few freckles, an almost too high color at times, strange, deep, night-blue, cat-like eyes, a long nose, a rather pleasant mouth, perfect teeth, and a really good chin, she moved always with a feline grace that was careless, superior, sinuous, and yet the acme of harmony and a rhythmic flow of lines.
One of her mess-hall tricks, when unobserved by her instructors, was to walk with six plates and a water-pitcher all gracefully poised on the top of her head after the fashion of the Asiatic and the African, her hips moving, her shoulders, neck, and head still.
Girls begged weeks on end to have her repeat this "stunt," as they called it. Another was to put her arms behind her and with a rush imitate the Winged Victory, a copy of which graced the library hall.
"You know," one little rosy-cheeked satellite used to urge on her, adoringly, "she must have been like you. Her head must have been like yours. You are lovely when you do it."
For answer Berenice's deep, almost black-blue eyes turned on her admirer with solemn unflattered consideration. She awed always by the something that she did not say.
The school, for all the noble dames who presided over it--solemn, inexperienced owl-like conventionalists who insisted on the last tittle and jot of order and procedure--was a joke to Berenice.
She recognized the value of its social import, but even at fifteen and sixteen she was superior to it. She was superior to her superiors and to the specimens of maidenhood--supposed to be perfect socially--who gathered about to hear her talk, to hear her sing, declaim, or imitate. She was deeply, dramatically, urgently conscious of the value of her personality in itself, not as connected with any inherited social standing, but of its innate worth, and of the artistry and wonder of her body. One of her chief delights was to walk alone in her room--sometimes at night, the lamp out, the moon perhaps faintly illuminating her chamber--and to pose and survey her body, and dance in some naive, graceful, airy Greek way a dance that was singularly free from sex consciousness--and yet was it? She was conscious of her body--of every inch of it--under the ivory-white clothes which she frequently wore. Once she wrote in a secret diary which she maintained--another art impulse or an affectation, as you will: "My skin is so wonderful. It tingles so with rich life. I love it and my strong muscles underneath.
I love my hands and my hair and my eyes. My hands are long and thin and delicate; my eyes are a dark, deep blue; my hair is a brown, rusty red, thick and sleepy. My long, firm, untired limbs can dance all night. Oh, I love life! I love life!"
You would not have called Berenice Fleming sensuous--though she was--because she was self-controlled. Her eyes lied to you. They lied to all the world. They looked you through and through with a calm savoir faire, a mocking defiance, which said with a faint curl of the lips, barely suggested to help them out, "You cannot read me, you cannot read me." She put her head to one side, smiled, lied (by implication), assumed that there was nothing. And there was nothing, as yet. Yet there was something, too--her inmost convictions, and these she took good care to conceal. The world --how little it should ever, ever know! How little it ever could know truly!
