“You are pitiless!” he said.
She laughed.
“As he was,—yes!”
And rising to her full height, she stood up like a queen. She wore a robe of dull amber stuff interwoven with threads of gold,—a small circlet of diamonds glittered in her hair, and Chauvet’s historic Eastern jewel, the “Eye of Rajuna,” flamed like fire on her white neck.
“Féodor Dimitrius,” she said,—and her voice had such a marvellously sweet intonation that he felt it penetrate through every nerve—“You say, and you say rightly, that ‘so far as I am woman’—my circumstances are not changed from what they were when I first came to you in Geneva. But only ‘so far as I am woman.’ Now—how do you know I am woman at all?”
He lifted himself in his chair, gripping both arms of it with clenched nervous hands. His dark eyes flashed a piercing inquiry into hers.
“What do you mean?” he half whispered. “What—what would you make me believe?”
She smiled.
“Oh, marvellous man of science!” she exclaimed—“Must I teach you your own discovery? You, who have studied and mastered the fusion of light and air with elemental forces and the invisible whirl of electrons with perpetually changing forms, must I, your subject, explain to you what you have done? You have wrested a marvellous secret from Nature—you can unmake and remake the human body, freeing it from all gross substance, as a sculptor can mould and unmould a statue,—and do you not see that you have made of me a new creature, no longer of mere mortal clay, but of an ethereal matter which has never walked on earth before?—and with which earth has nothing in common? What have such as I to do with such base trifles as human vengeance or love?”
He sprang up and approached her.