"I don't want to be embraced--for the King."
And I might have stopped there. But I didn't. With a perversity
which should be forgiven to those who suffer night and day and are
as if drunk with an exalted unhappiness, I went on: "For the sake
of an old cast-off glove; for I suppose a disdained love is not
much more than a soiled, flabby thing that finds itself on a
private rubbish heap because it has missed the fire."
She listened to me unreadable, unmoved, narrowed eyes, closed lips,
slightly flushed face, as if carved six thousand years ago in order
to fix for ever that something secret and obscure which is in all
women. Not the gross immobility of a Sphinx proposing roadside
riddles but the finer immobility, almost sacred, of a fateful
figure seated at the very source of the passions that have moved
men from the dawn of ages.
|