The query dismissed her resistance. Her mind opened to her master’s mind, her eyes to his eyes, her lips to his lips. A hideous impulse moved her, like the mania to leap from some incalculable height. Thought-pulse for thought-pulse, her sensation roused to his. A moan of torturing expectance escaped her.... She closed her eyes....
She wanted to want him.
In the blackness, Dolores saw the blacker truth. Her swooning sense of obligation to self was shocked into revival. Not him so much as something in herself must she resist—that desire put in woman to be mothers of men. Response meant utter degradation. More culpable than he who had not known the uplift of true love, she would sink lower far in hate’s degeneration. Down and down ... always down ... forever and forever down....
“I am a woman soul—I must have love to live, not lust!”
With the cry, she tore herself out of his grasp. And as she regained her feet, the bonds that had seemed so strong, broke apart, like dampened tissue.
“Vampire.”
His Highness’ hands clutched for her loosened hair. As again she fled him, he leaped in pursuit; abetted his steps with his hands; pulled himself forward with grasps of this and that. When he saw that she was trying the entrance door, he stopped in derisive anticipation of her return. A gleaming object from his pocket he waved at her, as illustration of the mental ban:
“The key, my queen—come get the key.”
His chortles loudened at her desperate exclamation:
“If only I could pray!”