But not then.
"Will you swear that it is as you say?" I asked her, white with passion.
As I have said, I was standing over her and very close. Her answer now was
suddenly to rise. Like a snake came she gliding upwards into my arms until
she lay against my breast, her face upturned, her eyes languidly veiled,
her lips a-pout.
"Can you do me so great a wrong, thinking you love me, knowing that I love
you?" she asked me.
For an instant we swayed together in that sweetly hideous embrace. I was
as a man sapped of all strength by some portentous struggle. I trembled
from head to foot. I cried out once--a despairing prayer for help, I think
it was--and then I seemed to plunge headlong down through an immensity of
space until my lips found hers. The ecstasy, the living fire, the anguish,
and the torture of it have left their indelible scars upon my memory. Even
as I write the cruelly sweet poignancy of that moment is with me again--
though very hateful now.
Thus I, blindly and recklessly, under the sway and thrall of that terrific
and overpowering temptation. And then there leapt in my mind a glimmer of
returning consciousness: a glimmer that grew rapidly to be a blazing light
in which I saw revealed the hideousness of the thing I did. I tore myself
away from her in that second of revulsion and hurled her from me, fiercely
and violently, so that, staggering to the seat from which she had risen,
she fell into it rather than sat down.
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