But she was made like a soft sweet woman.”
“And that is surely true!” said Féraz to himself, a little startled,—“For—if she is dead, as El-Râmi asserts, and her seeming life is but the result of his art, then indeed in the case of this Lilith ‘not a drop of her blood is human.’”
And the poem ran on in his mind—
“Lilith stood on the skirts of Eden:
(Alas, the hour!)
She was the first that thence was driven:
With her was hell, and with Eve was heaven.”
“Nay, I should transpose that,”—murmured the young man drowsily, staring out on the moonlit street—“I should say, ‘With Eve was hell, and with Lilith heaven.’ How strange it is I should never have thought of this poem before!—and I have often turned over the pages of Rossetti’s book,—since—since I saw her;—I must have actually seen the name of Lilith printed there, and yet it never suggested itself to me as being familiar or offering any sort of clue.”
He sighed perplexedly,—the heliotrope odours floated around him, and the gleam of the lamp in the room seemed to pale in the wide splendour of the moon-rays pouring through the window,—and still the delicate sprite of Poesy continued to remind him of familiar lines and verses he loved, though all the while he thought of Lilith, and kept on wondering vaguely and vainly what would be, what could be, the end of his brother’s experiment (whatever that was, for he, Féraz, did not know) on the lovely, apparently living girl who yet was dead. It was very strange—and surely, it was also very terrible!
“The day is dark and the night