The Cobra Dance was, strictly speaking, not a dance at all, for it was performed in sitting, crouching or kneeling postures. The dancer appeared in the rôle of a snake-charmer, and throwing off [Illustration: RUTH ST. DENIS FROM A DESIGN BY PAUL REITH IN _Jugend_ (MUNICH)] her mantle revealed her arms clasped over either shoulder, like two coiling snakes. On the first and fourth fingers of each hand two enormous emeralds gleamed like serpents’ eyes. The arms slowly unwound and with a curiously sinuous motion began to writhe about her body. They twined, coiled, fought and darted with lightning flashes in all directions, simulating the movements of the reptile with astonishing fidelity. It was a marvellous exercise in the flexibility of the arms. The Dance of the Spirit of Incense was set in a scene representing the women’s quarter of an Indian house. The dancer entered bearing aloft a bowl of smoking incense. With solemn, hierophantic gestures she kindled the two censers that were placed on either side of the stage, and, as the smoke curled upwards, she danced gravely and slowly, all the motions of her body subtly responding to the rhythm of the wreathing smoke and flowing so imperceptibly one into another that they seemed less a sequence of separate movements than a single continuous thrill passing from the feet to the finger-tips. But it was in the Nautch and the Temple Dances that Miss St Denis really established her claim to rank as a dancer of the first order. Clad in a dress of vivid green spangled with gold, her wrists and ankles encased in chattering silver bands, surrounded by the swirling curves of a gauze veil, the dancer passed from the first slow languorous movements into a vertiginous whirl of passionate delirium. Alluring in every gesture, for once she threw asceticism to the winds, and yet she succeeded in maintaining throughout that difficult distinction between the voluptuous and the lascivious. The mystic Dance of the Five Senses was a more artificial performance and only in one passage kindled into the passion of the Nautch. As the goddess Radha, she is dimly seen seated cross-legged behind the fretted doors of her shrine. The priests of the temple beat gongs before the idol and lay their offerings at her feet. Then the doors open, and Radha descends from her pedestal to suffer the temptation of the five senses. The fascination of each sense, suggested by a concrete object, is shown forth in the series of dances. Jewels represent the desire of the sight, of the hearing the music of bells, of the smell the scent of flowers, of the taste wine, and the sense of touch is fired by a kiss. Her dancing was inspired by that intensity of sensuous delight which is refined to its furthest limit probably only in the women of the East. She rightly chose to illustrate the delicacy of the perceptions not by abandon but by restraint. The dance of touch, in which every bend of the arms and of the body described the yearning for