She thought him repulsive and looked nervously round the room, which contained a number of open book-cases, with the curtains drawn back:
"Have you read all those books?" she asked.
"And read them over again. I do nothing else."
Stefanie de Laders was coughing more and more. Her feet were warm by this time. She was proof against much, but she felt as if she would faint with the smoke.
"Sha'n't we go now, Anton?"
He was not in the least inclined to go. He was greatly interested in Suetonius at the moment; and she had disturbed him in his fantasy, which was intense in him. But she had such a way of nagging insistency; and he was really a weak man.
"I must just wash my hands."
"Yes, do, for you reek of that pipe of yours."
He grinned, got up and, without hurrying himself, went to his bedroom. Nobody knew of his solitary fantasies, which became more intense as he grew older and more impotent in his sensuality; nobody knew of the lust of his imagination nor how, as he read Suetonius, he pictured how he had once, in a century long past, been Tiberius, how he had held the most furious orgies in gloomy solitude at Capri and committed murder in voluptuousness and sent the victims of his passions dashing into the sea from the rocks and surrounded himself with a bevy of children beautiful as Cupids. The hidden forces of his intellect and imagination, which he had always enjoyed secretly, with a certain shyness towards the outside world, had caused him to read and study deeply in his younger years; and he knew more than any one talking to him would ever have suspected. On his shelves, behind novels and statute-books, he concealed works on the Kabbala and Satanism, being especially attracted in his morbid fancies by the strange mysteries of antiquity and the middle ages and endowed with a powerful gift of thinking himself back into former times, into a former life, into historic souls to which he felt himself related, in which he incarnated himself. No one suspected it: people merely knew that he had been a mediocre official, that he read, that he smoked and that he had occasionally done shameful things. For the rest, his secret was his own; and that he often guessed at another's secret was a thing which not his mother nor Takma nor anybody would ever have suspected....
The moment he had gone to his bedroom, Aunt Stefanie rose, tripped to the bookshelves and let her eyes move swiftly along the titles. What a lot of books Anton had! Look at that whole shelf of Latin books: was Anton as learned as that? And behind them: what did he keep behind those Latin books? Great albums and portfolios: what was in them? Would she have time to look? She drew one from behind the Latin books and, with quick, bird-like glances at the bedroom, opened the album, which had Pompeii on it.... What were those strange prints and photographs? Taken from statues, quite naked, from mural and ceiling frescoes; and such queer subjects, thought Aunt Stefanie. What was it all, what were those things and people and bodies and attitudes? Were they merely jokes which she did not understand?... Nevertheless they were enough to make her turn pale; and her wrinkled little witch-face grew longer and longer in dismay, while her mouth opened wide. She turned the pages of the album more and more swiftly, so as to be sure and miss nothing, and then went back to certain plates which struck her particularly. The world, so new to her, of classical perversion sped past her awe-struck eyes in undivined sinfulness, represented by man and beast and man-beast in contortions which her imagination, untutored in sensuality, could never have suspected. A devil's sabbath hypnotized her from out of those pages; and the book, weighing so heavy in her trembling old fingers, burnt her; but she simply could not slip it back into its hidden nook ... just because she had never known ... and because she was very inquisitive ... and because she had never suspected superlative sin.... Those were the portals of Hell; the people who had acted so and thought so would burn in Hell-fire for ever: she not, fortunately!