He shivered from head to foot. Nevertheless he removed the tissue of white wool and wound it round the hair.
Chrysis’ face had little by little become illumined with the expression of eternity that death dispenses to the eyelids and hair of corpses. In the bluish whiteness of the cheeks, the azure veinlets gave the immobile head the appearance of cold marble. The diaphanous nostrils were distended above the fine lips. The fragile ears had something immaterial about them. Never, in any light, even in his dreams, had Demetrios seen such superhuman beauty and such a brilliancy of fading skin.
And then he remembered the words uttered by Chrysis during their first interview: “You only know my face. You do not know how beautiful I am!” An intense emotion suddenly stifles him. He wishes to know. He has the power.
Of his three days of passion he wishes to keep a souvenir which shall last longer than himself.—to lay bare the admirable body, to pose it as a model in the violent attitude in which he saw it in his dreams, and to create, from the corpse, the statue of Immortal Life.
He unclasps the buckle and unties the knot. He throws back the draperies. The body is heavy. He raises it. The head falls backwards. The breasts tremble. The arms drop pendent. He withdraws the robe entirely and casts it into the middle of the chamber. Heavily, the body falls back again.
Placing his two hands under the icy armpits, Demetrios pulls the dead woman to the upper end of the bed. He turns the head over on to the left cheek, collects and arranges the hair splendidly under the back. Then he raises the right arm, bends the forearm over the forehead, closes the still soft fingers over the stuff of a cushion: two admirable muscular lines, descending from the ear and elbow, meet under the right breast and bear it like a fruit.
The rough figure takes life and precision.
Afterwards, he arranges the legs, one stretched out stiffly on one side, the other with the knee raised and the heel almost touching the croup. He rectifies a few details, turns over the waist a little to the left, straightens out the right foot and takes off the bracelets, the necklaces and the rings, in order not to mar by a single dissonance the pure and complete harmony of feminine nudity.