He had little passion in him, or passion was dormant; and he had sought women, even in the hours of love, with coldness and with something of contempt for that license which, in the days of his comparative affluence, he had not denied himself. He thought always—
"De ces baisers puissants comme un dictame,
De ces transports plus vifs que des rayons,
Que reste-t-il? C'est affreux, ô mon âme!
Rien qu'un dessin fort pâle aux trois crayons."
And for those glowing colors of passion which burned so hotly for an instant, only so soon to fade out into the pallor of indifference or satiety, he had a contempt which almost took the place and the semblance of chastity.
He worked on and on, studying the sleeper at his feet with the keenness of a science that was as merciless in its way as the science which tortures and slaughters in order to penetrate the mysteries of sentient existence.
She was beautiful in her way, this dark strange foreign child, who looked as though her native home must have been where the Nile lily blooms, and the black brows of the Sphinx are bent against the sun.
She was beautiful like a young leopard, like a young python, coiled there, lightly breathing, and mute and motionless and unconscious. He painted her as he would have painted the leopard or python lying asleep in the heavy hush of a noon of the tropics. And she was no more to him than these would have been.
The shadows grew longer; the sunlight died off the bright head of the boy Hypnos; the feathery reeds on the bank without got a red flush from the west; there came a sudden burst of song from a boat-load of children going home from the meadows where they had gathered the first cowslips of the season in great sheaves that sent their sweetness on the air through the open window as they went by beneath the walls.
The shouts of the joyous singing rang shrilly through the silence; they pierced her ear and startled her from her slumber; she sprang up suddenly, with a bound like a hart that scents the hounds, and stood fronting him; her eyes opened wide, her breath panting, her nerves strained to listen and striving to combat.
For in the first bewildered instant of her awakening she thought that she was still in the market-place of the town, and that the shouts were from the clamor of her late tormentors.
He turned and looked at her.