“Can you call that life which sleeps perpetually and will not wake?” demanded El-Râmi.
“Would you have her wake?” asked Féraz, his heart beating quickly.
El-Râmi bent his burning gaze upon him.
“Not so,—for if she wakes, in the usual sense of waking—she dies a second death from which there can be no recall. There is the terror of the thing. Zaroba’s foolish teaching, and your misguided yielding to her temptation, might have resulted in the fatal end to my life’s best and grandest work. But—I forgive you;—you did not know,—and she—she did not wake.”
“She did not wake,” echoed Féraz softly. “No—but—she smiled!”
El-Râmi still kept his eyes fixed upon him,—there was an odd sense of irritation in his usually calm and coldly balanced organisation—a feeling he strove in vain to subdue. She smiled!—the exquisite Lilith—the life-in-death Lilith smiled, because Féraz had called her by some endearing name! Surely it could not be!—and, smothering his annoyance, he turned towards the writing-table and feigned to arrange some books and papers there.
“El-Râmi—” murmured Féraz again, but timidly—“If she was a child when she died as you say—how is it she has grown to womanhood?”
“By artificial vitality,”—said El-Râmi—“As a flower is forced under a hothouse,—and with no more trouble, and less consciousness of effort than a rose under a glass dome.”
“Then she lives,—” declared Féraz impetuously. “She lives,—artificial or natural, she has vitality. Through your power she exists, and if you chose, oh, if you chose, El-Râmi, you could wake her to the fullest life—to perfect consciousness,—to joy—to love!—Oh, she is in a blessed trance—you cannot call her dead!”
El-Râmi turned upon him abruptly.