“Believe me,” she said slowly, a look of infinite joy glorifying her upraised countenance, “the Herculean power of the Dios Kouroi can, when ordered, bring from the upper air a morsel to the Cerberi, and without weapons win them away to the heights.”
Then to her it was as if down-reaching mighty arms, with clasped hands passed under her feet, lifted her with blissful enswathement to an electric oneness with delight-in-right.
Elkhorn felt as if he were walking on a wave of light, whose warmth filled the marrow of his bones. Feeling, too, he was one of the very gods for whom Ethel had asked, he opened his mouth to boast: “I have tasted, I can give,” when it all passed, and he dared not boast of what he now doubted having for the moment received.
Paul Palmer had covered his eyes, and stood trembling, white, radiant and reverently assured forever, that there was an “upper air,” and that there was a goddess there; and that for him life held but one purpose,—and that was to do Herculean work for the hundred-headed masses who all hated their chains as heartily as did he. Masses all of whom would win away to the heights, to go no more down forever, could they but be fed with such morsels as these there, in that moment of transfiguration had tasted.
“There will be no more working against nature when in the near future the mountain of the house of Yod He-Vaw shall be established in the top of the mountain,” said Daniel, “for the center of gravitation will be established in the upper air when woman, released from bondage to brutality, bounds up and stands at her post. Then all men will scale Alpine heights of purity, wisdom and wealth, for the love of the womanhood there, the eternal feminine in Deity.”
“Alpine heights! Woman there!”
It was a cry of rapture from beyond the portière, in the added suite of rooms which had been built on for Reginald Grove’s use.
Ethel heard it, and explaining it as if she were double-brained, said: “He is in the garden of Eden, the place of innocence where spirits in liberty live, as live the lilies of God; neither fearing, fighting, nor desiring desires; but where, welcoming the will-of-wisdom, they become like the self-unioned One. See?”
With a swift impulse, turning on one toe-poised limb, winding so, her clinging gown about her svelt figure, with arms extended, head thrown back and face upraised, she stood, a radiant image of dual being, unified in cruciform.