After me as you never saw!
Theodosia: I’ll tell him nothing.
Second Voice:
By means of secret charms to draw
All creatures living beneath the sun.
First Voice, arguing: Tell him how it is here. Say, “As an old friend, Frank, I’ll tell you my situation....”
Theodosia: I’ll say nothing. Shut your blabber.
Second Voice: Last night while you were asleep a great black face, a man’s face, mouth open, teeth wide, bloody throat, came swimming, tonight will come swimming close into your eyes, into the very light of your brain. Swims up into your sight.
She turned quickly toward the window to dispel the too-vivid dream and looked at the boughs of the trees as they stood as cold lace against the sky. Across the steep ledge of dull light some crows were moving on stiff wings, the movements of the birds and the birds being two separate things, unrelated. When the birds were gone the movement remained, sobbing against the wall of light.
A morning in January cut across the air in a different way from a morning in some former month, she observed. The sky beyond the matted twigs of the trees crowded outward in unequal grays, but the twigs bore upward their January buds that were swollen in spite of the cold. She began to think of the Promethean substance, fire, diligently admired by man and guarded. First a few bits of thin wood at the end of a match, a faint sulphurous odor, a frail burning daintily coaxed to life and tenderly nursed by the shaded palm of a hand. The smoke would arise heavily, unwarmed as yet, and the blaze would spread and lie cautiously, perilously, buried under the damp smouldering wood. Another splinter and another, and then the blaze grows slowly, spreading laterally, having consumed the first splint and turned it to a bent cinder of red ash. Wood is laid across the steady blaze now and the fire laps lovingly around it. The cold slips back from the hearth and the breast reaches toward the warmth, the hands feel for it, outstretched. One is glad for it, grateful to it. In the northern zones man could not live without it. His life is owed to it. If the Promethean spell is lost man would shrink down toward the tropics, though the men might venture into the cold regions to hunt. Woman and fire are married now forever; she would have to have fire for herself and for the young.