Ah! what a marriage! How terrible! and how complete! With the finality of death, and yet more than death. The arms of the twilit Pan. And the awful, half-intelligible voice from the cloud.
She could conceive now her marriage with Cipriano; the supreme passivity, like the earth below the twilight, consummate in living lifelessness, the sheer solid mystery of passivity. Ah, what an abandon, what an abandon, what an abandon!—of so many things she wanted to abandon.
Cipriano put his hand, with its strange soft warmth and weight, upon her knee, and her soul melted like fused metal.
“En poco tiempo, verdad?” he said to her, looking into her eyes with the old, black, glinting look, of power about to consummate itself.
“In a little while, no?”
She looked back at him, wordless. Language had abandoned her, and she leaned silent and helpless in the vast, unspoken twilight of the Pan world. Her self had abandoned her, and all her day was gone. Only she said to herself:
“My demon lover!”
Her world could end in many ways, and this was one of them. Back to the twilight of the ancient Pan world, where the soul of woman was dumb, to be forever unspoken.
The car had stopped, they had come to Jamiltepec. He looked at her again, as reluctantly he opened the door. And as he stepped out, she realised again his uniform, his small figure in uniform. She had lost it entirely. She had only known his face, the face of the supreme god-demon; with the arching brows and slightly slanting eyes, and the loose, light tuft of a goat-beard. The Master. The everlasting Pan.
He was looking back at her again, using all his power to prevent her seeing in him the little general in uniform, in the worldly vision. And she avoided his eyes, and saw nothing.