Assuming an air of boyish familiarity, which harmonized better perhaps with her leather-bound ankles than with her girlish figure, Gladys jumped down at once from the little stage and ran gaily to welcome him. She held out her hand, and then, raising both her arms to her head and smoothing back her bright hair beneath its circlet of bronze, she inquired of him, in a soft low murmur, whether he thought she looked “nice.”
Clavering was struck dumb. He had all those shivering sensations of trembling agitation which are described with such realistic emphasis in the fragmentary poem of Sappho. The playful girl, her fair cheeks flushed with excitement and a treacherous light in her blue eyes, swung herself upon the rough oak table that stood in the middle of the room, and sat there, smiling coyly at him, dangling her sandalled feet. She still held in her hand the strawberries she had picked; and as, with childish gusto, she put one after another of these between her lips, she looked at him with an indescribable air of mischievous, challenging defiance.
“So this is the pagan thing,” thought the poor priest, “that it is my duty to initiate into the religion of sacrifice!”
He could not prevent the passing through his brain of a grotesque and fantastic vision in which he saw himself, like a second hermit of the Thebaid, leading this equivocal modern Thaïs to the waters of Jordan. Certainly the association of such a mocking white-armed darling of errant gods with the ceremony of confirmation was an image somewhat difficult to embrace! The impatient artist, apologizing profusely to the embarrassed visitor, soon dragged off his model to her couch on the platform, and it fell to the lot of the infatuated priest to subside in paralyzed helplessness, on a modest seat at the back of the room. What thoughts, what wild unpermitted thoughts, chased one another in strange procession through his soul, as he stared at the beautiful heathen figure thus presented to his gaze!
The movements of the artist, the heavy stream of sunlight falling aslant the room, the sweet exotic smells borne in from the window opening on the conservatory, seemed all to float and waver about him, as though they were things felt by a deep-sea diver beneath a weight of humming waters. He gave himself up completely to what that moment brought.
Faith, piety, sacrifice, devotion, became for him mere words and phrases—broken, fragmentary, unmeaning—sounds heard in the shadow-land of sleep, vague and indistinct like the murmur of drowned bells under a brimming tide.
It may well be believed that the langourously reclining model was not in the least oblivious to the effect she produced. This was, indeed, one of Gladys’ supreme moments, and she let no single drop of its honeyed distillation pass undrained. She permitted her heavy-lidded blue eyes, suffused with a soft dreamy mist, to rest tenderly on her impassioned lover; and as if in response to the desperate longing in his look, a light-fluttering, half-wistful smile crossed her parted lips, like a ripple upon a shadowy stream.
The girl’s vivid consciousness of the ecstasy of power was indeed, in spite of her apparent lethargic passivity, never more insanely aroused. Lurking beneath the dreamy sweetness of the look with which she responded to Clavering’s magnetized gaze, were furtive depths of Circean remorselessness. Under her gentian-blue robe her youthful breast trembled with exultant pleasure, and she felt as though, with every delicious breath she drew, she were drinking to the dregs the very wine of the immortals.
“I must give Mr. Clavering some strawberries!” she suddenly cried, jumping to her feet, and breaking both the emotional and the æsthetic spell as if they were gossamer-threads. “He looks bored and tired.”