Suddenly she remembered another loose thread that needed to be gathered up. The roman of her dances had not been brought to a climax.
An unwritten law of the style gallant makes the action of a roman automatically cease after a declaration of love. Nothing can happen afterwards. What if she should force time to its fullness and make a declaration? It would be burning her boats, it would be staking all her happiness on this last meeting, for if it were a failure hope would be dead. For, owing to her strange confusion of the happenings of her dances with those of real life, the roman of the one having been completed, its magical virtue all used up, its colophon reached, she felt that the roman of the other would also have reached its colophon, that nothing more could happen. But for great issues she must take great risks ... dansons!
Sappho and Madeleine are reclining on a bank, the colour and design of which rival all the carpets in the bazaars of Bagdad. There is no third person to mar their ravishing solitude à deux. Madeleine is saying,—
‘I must confess, Madame, that your delicious writings have made me a heretic.’
Sappho laughs gaily. ‘Then I tremble for your fate, for heretics are burned.’
‘In that case I am indeed a heretic, for a flame has long burned me,’ says Madeleine boldly. But Sappho possesses in a high degree the art of hearing only what she chooses, and she says, a trifle coldly,—
‘If my writings have made you a heretic, they must themselves be heretical. Do they contain Five Propositions worthy of papal condemnation?’
‘Madame, you are resolved to misunderstand me. They have made me a heretic in regard to the verdict of posterity as to the merits of the ancients, for since I have steeped myself, if I may use the expression, in your incomparable style I have become as deaf as Odysseus to the siren songs of Greece and Rome.’
‘That is indeed heresy,’ cries Sappho with a smile that shows she is not ill-pleased. ‘I fear it will be visited by excommunication by the whole College of Muses.’