When the door was opened I saw a woman waiting. She was wrapped in a sort of mantle, like a travelling cloak, fastened around the throat. Above, the head was poised. I saw that her hair was blond, and that she was young. Beneath the shadow of her tresses gleamed very dark eyes. The face was a trifle teasing in its expression, and rather sensual, the mouth being very red.
“Do you wish me to come in?” she said, inclining her sweet head upon her shoulder.
I drew back, flattened as it were against the wall, suffering from the genuine, the natural astonishment of a man who has to open his door at such an hour to a woman of whom he has not the slightest recollection—a woman, too, who used the intimate form of address, “thou,” in the first phrase she used.
“My dear lady,” I said, with a touch of timidity, as I followed her into my chamber, “spare me any blame. Of course I recognize you clearly, but by some lapse of memory I do not recall your name. Is it not Lucienne or Tototte?”
She smiled a tender, indulgent smile, but, making no reply, unfastened her mantle.
Her robe was of sea-green silk, with an iris pattern. Snared in the low-cut corsage were beautiful breasts, that seemed as though they longed to burst forth—a flow of imprisoned beauty. Clasped around each of the nude, dark arms was a golden snake, with glittering emerald eyes. Around the throat of darkest cream were two rows of pearls—pearls that had meant the loss of many lives.
“If you remember me it is because we have met in the land of dreams, or in some land of the mind, where it seems that dreams come true. I am Callisto, daughter of Lamia. During eighteen hundred years my tomb has had peace. It is in the flowerful fields and woods of Daphne, near to the hills where were the voluptuous dwelling-places of Antioch. But in these days even the tombs have no abiding home. They took me to Paris, and my shadow or spirit followed. For a long time I slept in the icy caves of the Louvre. I should have been there for ever and ever if it had not been for a great and grand pagan, a really holy man, Louis Ménard. He is the only living man in all this land who knows to-day the signs and symbols of the ancient divinities. Before my tomb he solemnly pronounced the words that of old gave a nightly and transitory life to the unhappy dead! Therefore behold me. For seven hours each night I may go through your miserable city....”
“Oh, child of the older world,” I cried, “how you must see the change the world sorrows under!”
“Yes, and yet no. I find the dwellings dark, the dresses ugly, the sky sorrowful. How oddly you dress for such a climate. I find that life in general is more stupid, and that human beings look much less happy than in the older and more golden days. But if there is one thing that greatly stupefies me, it is to see that you have still so many of the things that I knew of old. What ... in eighteen hundred years have you all made nothing more, nothing new? Is that so really and truly? What I have seen in the houses, the open air, the streets, is that all? Have you not succeeded in finding a new thing? If not, what misery, my friend!”