“Demetrios! Demetrios! Is it you? Oh! You have come at last! You are here!” she murmured, clasping him in her arms, as her voice rang with the accents of happiness. “Is it really you, Demetrios, whose hands awake me? Is it you, son of my goddess; God of my body and my life?”
Demetrios made as if to retreat. With one bound, she was close to him again.
“What do you fear?” she said. “For you I am not the woman before whom all tremble, because she is surrounded by the might of the High Priest. Forget my name, Demetrios. In their lovers’ arms, women have no name. I am no longer what you think. I am nothing but a woman who loves and whose yearning for you fills her frame as far as the points of her breasts.”
Demetrios did not open his lips.
“Listen to me a little while longer,” she went on. “I know who enthrals you. I will not even be your mistress, nor make the least attempt to rival the queen. No, Demetrios. Do with me as you will. Take me like some little slave-wench that a man possesses for a few minutes, leaving her afterwards with a remembrance that becomes oblivion. Take me like the lowest poverty-stricken harlot who, crouching by the roadside, awaits the charity of some furtive and brutal attack of lust. After all, what am I to place myself above those women? Have the Immortals given me anything more than that with which they have endowed the most servile of all my slaves? You, at least, are Beauty incarnate, with its out spreading emanations of the Gods.”
Demetrios, more steadfastly serious than before, pierced her with his glance.
“Wretched creature, what do you suppose emanates from the Gods, if it be not. — ”
“Love!”
“Or Death!”
“What mean you?” she exclaimed, starting to her feet. “Death! Yes, Death indeed! But it is so far off for me! In sixty years’ time, I’ll think of my end. Why speak to me of Death, Demetrios?”