“To swoon, madam or miss, is out of date down here. I pray you postpone the attempt for some less sophisticated audience.”
Sin, leaning forward from his especial chair just back of the throne, dared to insinuate: “And I pray you, Damnity, do not sentence her until you have considered her. There is something exceptional about her. She may have been sent to prove that idea of mine.”
Satan scorned to notice the suggestion.
“Come,” he ordered the woman soul, “show your passport.”
As though from shame, she crumpled against her breast a scarlet slip. Shaking back her hair, she looked up at him.
His Highness, startled, returned her look. He did not heed or hear Sin’s gasp of anticipation. He forgot the seven, the pages and the dwarfs. Leaning lower, he looked and looked.
Truly he, who had been the fate of most fair women since Eve, never had beheld one of a face of such appeal.
CHAPTER II
The multiple-candle glow from the Mephistophelian coat-of-arms lit the girl-soul’s features. From a veil that well might have been worn on Earth for mourning, so black was her hair and enveloping, they gleamed as if carved from Parian marble. The curve of her chin, the fullness of lips blent into faint, downward-traced lines, the tube-rose texture of her cheeks, all lent a suggestion of pliancy, even weakness. Above, her classic nose and broad forehead offered contradiction—were sculped as from a master’s inspiration.
Lesser wonders as to the personality behind the marble mask merged into that aroused by her eyes. Colored like the purpling depths of a midnight sky, they concealed, rather than revealed. From beneath straight brows they gazed forth, not as a hope that is lost in darkness, but as hope resting from its weariness, to rise again at dawn. Over her face they shed a light of mystery that made its beauty negligible—a mystery based neither on courage nor fear, pride nor shame, joy nor dole. They asked what confused the mind and haunted the imagination, that demand of why—why—to which only the Creator of souls Himself one day may make satisfactory reply.