Emeralda looked down at kneeling Psyche. The princess approached her sister, took the jewels, examined them attentively, held them up to the light of the candles, and then dropped them into an open casket. Thoughtfully she continued gazing at Psyche. And she seemed to Psyche like a gigantic jewel-spider, watching from the midst of her glittering web the rays of her own splendour. But whatever she were, princess, sun, spider, or jewel, a woman she was not, a human being she was not, and through the opal of her bosom gleamed her heart of ruby.
Psyche, kneeling penitent, spoke not, awaiting her fate, and Emeralda watched her.
Thoughts, mechanical as wheels, rolled through her brain. She thought as a machine. She was inexorable, because she had no feeling; she thought inhumanly because she had no soul. Soulless she was and hard as stone, but she was powerful, the mightiest ruler of the world. She ruled with a movement, she condemned with a look, she could kill with a smile; if she spoke a word, it was terrible; if she appeared in public there was disaster; and if she rode through her kingdom in a triumphal chariot, then everything was scorched by her lustre and crushed under her triumph.
At last she spoke, motionless like a spider in her web of glittering rays, and her voice sounded like an oracle in a screeching incantation.
“Psyche, fled from her father’s house, fallen from all princely dignity, dethroned Princess of the Present, immoral Bacchante, corrupt and wingless, weeping tears of scarlet sin—listen!
“Psyche, who wandered frivolously to purple streaks of sky, who longed for the nothingness of azure and of light, who loved a horse, who forsook her husband, who wandered and sought and asked, in desert and in wood—wander, seek, and ask!
“Wander, seek, and ask, till you find!
“Wander along the flaming caves, seek in the fire-vomiting mouths of monsters, ask of the martyred spirits, who roll upon the inky sea.
“Descend to the Nether-world! Seek the Mystic Jewel, the Philosopher’s Stone that gives the highest omnipotence; seek the Mystic Jewel, the rays of which reach to eternity and penetrate to the Godhead.
“Descend, wander, ask, seek, and find!”