Yet the next minute she raised with listless indifference a peach to her parted lips, red and fresh as the fruit itself.
“She is right, it is sin,” the old thought flashed across his mind. “With woman began sin, root of all our death.”
Involuntarily he too glanced back at the holy image; just such an image as this had fallen out of his father’s hands one stormy night in the Summer Garden and broken at the foot of the Petersburg Venus, the white she-devil.
Afrossinia stood against the door which opened on the blue sea, and her body, glowing and white like the foam of waves, seemed to have freshly left them and arisen from the surging deep. In one hand she held the fruit, with the other she shielded her nakedness, like the Foam-born. Behind her frothed and sparkled the blue sea, an ambrosial cup, and the noise of its ripples suggested the eternal laughter of the gods.
It was that same girl Afrossinia, who, one evening in early spring, bending low over her naked feet, had been washing the floor in the house of Viasemski. It was that girl and the goddess Aphrodite merged into one.
“Venus, Venus, the White Witch!” thought the Tsarevitch, almost ready to flee from her. But from the body of this innocent sinner, as from an open flower, there came to him a familiar, intoxicating, awful perfume; no longer master of himself he bent lower still and kissed her feet, and, looking into her eyes, whispered as in prayer:
“Tsaritsa, my Tsaritsa.”
Meantime the dim flame of the little lamp was flickering to and fro before the sacred and sorrowful Face.