Margaret Busbee Shipp

“ The dancing grew swifter and fiercer. The music had a dull, reiterated note, like the beating of summer rains steaming against the heated earth. There was the thrill of lush growth, of mating.
It became unendurable, intolerable, to the man who watched. He crossed in a Stride to the swami, put a hand roughly on his shoulder, and spoke in a voice of harsh authority:
“ Enough of this! You are tiring her. Can’t you see she is — ”
The sentence was never finished. As Garren put that angry hand on the Hindu’s Shoulder, Zoe darted swiftly at him. ”

“ Garren had been a year-old baby at the time of his father’s death, and Mrs. Ward had poured all her hopes, her prayers, her aspirations, into the single channel of his happiness and well-being. Now she was suddenly confronted with the stark fact that if youth chooses to ruin its life, there is nothing that maturity can do but hold its painful peace.
With her habit of trying to see her son’s point of view as clearly as her own, she realized how compelling the force of at- traction which drew him to Zoe must be, to make him fall in love with a girl absolutely outside of his own class. ”

“ Zoe caught her train and twisted its soft brown folds around one arm, but it was not more pliant than the movements of her sin- uous, exquisite body, with a grace that seemed more than mortal.
It was as if they entered with her into the kingdom of the dance— an empire older than the oldest throne, a dynasty stretch- ing beyond human knowledge, gathering its myrmidons from the four corners of the earth, as glad as youth, as resistless as the tide, as capricious as the wind, as endur- ing as time. ”