The originality of the dances she invented for her own amusement was the outcome.
But, side by side with this love of all that was beautiful, she absorbed from her mother a certain sophisticated understanding of life which was somewhat startling in one of her tender years, and this, too, betrayed itself in her dancing.

For it is an immutable law that everything--good, bad, and indifferent--which lies in the soul of an artist ultimately reveals itself in his work.
And Magda, inheriting the underlying ardour of her father's temperament and the gutter-child's sharp sense of values which was her mother's Latin Quarter garnering, at the age of eight danced, with all the beguilement and seductiveness of a trained and experienced dancer.
Even Hugh himself was not proof against the elusive lure of it.

He chanced upon her one day, dancing in her nursery, and was so carried away by the charm of the performance that for the moment he forgot that she was transgressing one of his most rigid rules.
In the child's gracious, alluring gestures he was reminded of the first time that he had seen her mother dance, and of how it had thrilled him.
Beneath the veneer with which his self-enforced austerity had overlaid his emotions, he felt his pulses leap, and was bitterly chagrined at being thus attracted.
He found himself brought up forcibly once more against the inevitable consequences of his marriage with Diane, and reasoned that through his weakness in making such a woman his wife, he had let loose on the world a feminine thing dowered with the seductiveness of a Delilah and backed--here came in the exaggerated family pride ingrained in him--by all the added weight and influence of her social position as a Vallincourt.
"Never let me see you dance again, Magda," he told her.

"It is forbidden.

If you disobey you will be severely punished." Magda regarded him curiously out of a pair of long dark eyes the colour of black smoke.