To this technical perfection Genée adds certain spiritual qualities which are all her own. As I have said, the _Dryad_ revealed a dramatic ability which had been perhaps overlooked in the admiration of her pure dancing. This capacity for pantomime would probably have been earlier appreciated if the ballets at the Empire had allowed it more scope. But the peculiar note of her spirit is an abounding gaiety, as clear and elemental as that of a child, affecting the heart like vital and exhilarating laughter. There is a kind of arch-merriment in her dancing which seems to flow out of the pure exultation of movement, at times almost threatening to break through the restraints of technique and convert the dance into a romp. But the elasticity of the dance is always great enough to meet the freest ebullience of spirits; there is, as it were, no leakage of vitality; every atom of force is spent in steps and movements that never lose their precision and exactitude. Genée’s dancing refutes those detractors who assert that the academic style of the ballet is a fatal limitation to the artist’s freedom of expression. She shows that, when it is brought to the perfection to which she has developed it, it is fluent and elastic enough to express the extremes of, at any rate, the more volatile emotions. The hunting dance in _High Jinks_ carries the dance as far in the direction of high spirits, of exhilaration unmixed with passion, of sheer delight in the physical fact of life, as it can possibly go. The spirited little horsewoman in the black riding-habit, that clings closely to the lines of her gay and lithe [Illustration: ADELINE GENÉE _Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._] figure, has an air at once of fragility and vigour; she is borne through the air on her dashing leaps, she curvets, she caracoles, the slender steely limbs make nothing of the weighty burden of the skirt and boots--and yet it is all done with such a whirl and wind of enthusiasm that the motive force appears to be not muscular activity but merely a fever of the blood. All the jollity, all the glorious high spirits, all the high-heartedness, all the intoxication of delight, in all the hunting mornings that ever were, are concentrated in that swaying, swirling, leaping, laughing figure. There is something essentially of the North in Genée’s dancing, a freshness and energy like that of the north wind, a hint of the athlete in the vigorous clean-limbed movements, an absence of passion, a purity, shall we say a coldness? Her spirit seems to belong to the heights rather than to the depths. It is bright rather than subtle. It is full of high lights but lacking in half-tones.