“Yes,” he said, “that and nothing else, at this point. It is a fulfilment—the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head—the dark involuntary being. It is death to one’s self—but it is the coming into being of another.”
“But how? How can you have knowledge not in your head?” she asked, quite unable to interpret his phrases.
“In the blood,” he answered; “when the mind and the known world is drowned in darkness everything must go—there must be the deluge. Then you find yourself a palpable body of darkness, a demon—”
“But why should I be a demon—?” she asked.
“‘Woman wailing for her demon lover’—” he quoted—“why, I don’t know.”
Hermione roused herself as from a death—annihilation.
“He is such a dreadful satanist, isn’t he?” she drawled to Ursula, in a queer resonant voice, that ended on a shrill little laugh of pure ridicule. The two women were jeering at him, jeering him into nothingness. The laugh of the shrill, triumphant female sounded from Hermione, jeering him as if he were a neuter.
“No,” he said. “You are the real devil who won’t let life exist.”
She looked at him with a long, slow look, malevolent, supercilious.
“You know all about it, don’t you?” she said, with slow, cold, cunning mockery.