I lifted her into my arms wholly, and walked through the door into the corridor to the opposite room—our room, and laid her on the bed. He followed me to the bedside and bent over her. I drew back and stood beside the curtain motionless. Everything was swaying before my eyes in darkened confusion. Was this my wedding night? There was the room, full of warm, shaded light; there was the bed, and on it a passive woman's figure, and another man bent over it and tore aside the bodice and unclasped the white stays.
I watched his hand part them and pass indifferently beneath them, and beneath the linen, and rest over the left breast and then beneath it. The shade grew colder on his face. There was an intense silence in the room, then the words came across it, "Quite extinct." My ears seemed to fill with sounds, the ground to rise upward, the bed to heave, and I went forward blindly and tore his hand from her breast and pushed him from the bed.
"Then go and leave us," I said, and I heard my own voice as from a great distance.
He looked at me, and his face and everything around was dark before my eyes.
"Will you kindly go out of this room?" I repeated, and he walked to the door.
I opened it, he passed out, and I shut and locked it, and came back to the bed. The weight of nerveless, passive beauty on it had crushed a depression in its whiteness, the head had sunk down sideways to the pillow as in tired sleep. Across the throat and breast, over and amongst the disturbed laces of her dress, and on the parted gleaming satin of her stays fell a flood of rose-coloured light. One shoulder rose from it and caught a shadow; another shade lay lower in the dimples of the elbow; the inside of the arm looked warm. The throat, the round soft throat, seemed glowing; the fallen head, the passive arms, the whole outstretched form seemed relaxed in the abandonment of sleep. Had I often seen her in my dreams like this? This was but the realisation of my dreams. I bent over her, then threw myself wildly upon the bed beside her, and drew her into my arms.
"Lucia! my Lucia!" The sweet face almost seemed to smile as I drew the head to me, and a soft curl of hair fell upon my arm as I pushed it round her neck and pressed her breast to mine. It came softly and unresistingly, just so much as my arm pressed it, with terrible compliance. The throat chilled through my arm to the bone, numbed it.
I laid my other hand upon her neck, pushed it lower till it rested above her heart, and enclosed one breast, nerveless, pulseless, and cold, colder than any snow. Slowly it chilled through my fingers. I smoothed one passive arm—how cold. Then my hand sought her waist, and my arm leant upon her hip—as once in Paris—and here the coldness held and froze me.
Through her silk skirt it penetrated; the damp, eternal coldness pierced through my quivering, living arm; it seemed dividing my veins like steel.
It was a dead woman that I clasped: a corpse. I strained my eyes down upon her face, that seemed but asleep.