For Berenice, also, was a music-rack full of classic music and song collections, a piano, a shelf of favorite books, painting-materials, various athletic implements, and several types of Greek dancing-tunics which she had designed herself, including sandals and fillet for her hair.

She was an idle, reflective, erotic person dreaming strange dreams of a near and yet far-off social supremacy, at other times busying herself with such social opportunities as came to her.

A more safely calculating and yet wilful girl than Berenice Fleming would have been hard to find.
By some trick of mental adjustment she had gained a clear prevision of how necessary it was to select the right socially, and to conceal her true motives and feelings; and yet she was by no means a snob, mentally, nor utterly calculating.

Certain things in her own and in her mother's life troubled her--quarrels in her early days, from her seventh to her eleventh year, between her mother and her stepfather, Mr.Carter; the latter's drunkenness verging upon delirium tremens at times; movings from one place to another--all sorts of sordid and depressing happenings.

Berenice had been an impressionable child.
Some things had gripped her memory mightily--once, for instance, when she had seen her stepfather, in the presence of her governess, kick a table over, and, seizing the toppling lamp with demoniac skill, hurl it through a window.