Once more tormentor and tormented were alone. Slowly the Past-Master of Policy righted himself and his intent. Returning to the prostrate girl-shade, he thinkingly regarded her. Her side face lay lax upon the board, exquisite as an irradiated cameo in its twisted setting of hair. Closed were those eyes of the purples of the bourgainvillae. Not a breath lifted the luring lines of the back revealed by her décolleté. Could her spirit really have swooned beyond his reach?
He shrugged away the thought. Too often and too vehemently had he himself longed for surcease from consciousness in the last ten thousand years or so. Too well he knew that she still could hear him. Through time which had no beginning and could not end, she as well as he must continue to think—and think—and think.
Thinking of her now as he looked, he felt more than before attracted toward that new idea regarding her which had been inspired by the latest chapter of her earth history. The oldest Original was right. His ways with women were archaic as his clothes in the sight of this most modern of Magdalenes. No repression of his ruthlessness or change in his “style” would be too great a price to pay for success in that experiment.
When he spoke it was in mild tones.
“Forgive my stupidity. ‘It ain’t inherited—it’s a gift.’ All right, fairest fiend. We’ll call it a séance to-night. Or better, suppose I give you a lift over the scene which has overwhelmed you with self-consciousness. At that, it may affect me worse to tell it myself. They say the narrator gets more out of his story than his hearers. He first must feel to arouse feeling. A good bad idea. So then, I’ll tell you.”
The tips of his fingers crackled as he touched them to his lips, then waved them toward the unresponsive audience.
“Behind the Asterisks!” he announced his subject. “The Great-I-Am invented the sex-impulse in order to give life to love. Necessarily He had to make it a strong emotion in order to people His earth.
“I invented loveless lust to people Hell. None born of the flesh dares deny his vulnerability. None but feels its basic attraction, even at times when most repulsed. Not to its cruder phases do I invite your attention—to the reproductive instinct of the mortal male. That is ever awake, unashamed, engaging chiefly through its strength.
“But sleeping passion! Too few are given the dear delight of arousing it. To breathe open the eyes searching through their mist of dreams—to kiss into consciousness the sweet-thick lips—to feel one’s sluggish pulse speeding to match the beat of youth’s startled heart——
“Ah, what man-brute of Earth, what god of Heaven or fiend of Hell would not gladly give the wealth of three worlds to incite the divine awakening!