Voss arose with a tormented look on his face. The merriment in those faces was like a bodily chastisement to him. From behind his glittering eye-glasses he directed a venomous glance toward Eva, and said in troubled tones: “In the same context of Scripture the Lord bids Israel hurl aside its adornments that He may see what He will do with them. The meaning is clear.”
“He cannot expiate the lust of the eye,” Christian thought, and avoided Eva’s glance.
Amadeus Voss left the company and the house. On the street he ran as though pursued, clasping his hands to his temples. He had pushed his derby hat far back. When he reached his room, he opened his box and drew out a package of letters. They were the stolen letters of the unknown woman F. He sat down by his lamp, and read with tense absorption and a burning forehead. It was not the first night that he had passed thus.
When Eva was alone with Christian, she asked: “Why did you bring that man with you?”
He laughed, and lifted her up in his arms, and carried her through many flights of rooms and out of light into darkness.
“The sea cries!” her lips said at his ear.
He prayed that all sounds might die out of the world except the thunder of the sea and that young voice at his ear. He prayed that those two might silence the disquiet that overcame him in her very embraces and made him, at the end of every ecstasy, yearn for its renewal.
That slender, passionate body throbbed toward him. Yet he heard the lamentation of an alien voice: What shall we do?
“Why did you bring this man?” Eva asked him far in the night, between sleep and sleep. “I cannot bear him. There is always sweat on his forehead. He comes from a sinister world.”
There was a bluish twilight in the room that came from the blue flame of a blue lamp, and a bluish darkness lay beyond the windows.