“You were afraid of me last night.”
“Really—of course—but won’t you sit down?”
She sat down, and enjoyed my embarrassment—for actually I was even more afraid of her now in the full light of day. A delightful expression of contempt hovered about her upper lip.
“You look at love, and especially woman,” she began, “as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.”
“You don’t share it?”
“I do not share it,” she said quickly and decisively, shaking her head, so that her curls flew up like red flames.
“The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks—pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan.
‘Doest thou imagine long the goddess of love took counsel
When in Ida’s grove she was pleased with the hero Anchises?’
“These lines from Goethe’s Roman Elegy have always delighted me.
“In nature there is only the love of the heroic age, ‘when gods and goddesses loved.’ At that time ‘desire followed the glance, enjoyment desire.’ All else is factitious, affected, a lie. Christianity, whose cruel emblem, the cross, has always had for me an element of the monstrous, brought something alien and hostile into nature and its innocent instincts.