Caresses can roar.  If you doubt it, observe the lion’s.  The woman was horrible, and yet full of grace.  The effect was tragic.  First he felt the claw, then the velvet of the paw.  A feline attack, made up of advances and retreats.  There was death as well as sport in this game of come and go.  She idolized him, but arrogantly.  The result was contagious frenzy.  Fatal language, at once inexpressible, violent, and sweet.  The insulter did not insult; the adorer outraged the object of adoration.  She, who buffeted, deified him.  Her tones imparted to her violent yet amorous words an indescribable Promethean grandeur.  According to AEschylus, in the orgies in honour of the great goddess the women were smitten by this evil frenzy when they pursued the satyrs under the stars.  Such paroxysms raged in the mysterious dances in the grove of Dodona.  This woman was as if transfigured—­if, indeed, we can term that transfiguration which is the antithesis of heaven.

Her hair quivered like a mane; her robe opened and closed.  The sunshine of the blue eye mingled with the fire of the black one.  She was unearthly.

Gwynplaine, giving way, felt himself vanquished by the deep subtilty of this attack.

“I love you!” she cried.  And she bit him with a kiss.

Homeric clouds were, perhaps, about to be required to encompass Gwynplaine and Josiana, as they did Jupiter and Juno.  For Gwynplaine to be loved by a woman who could see and who saw him, to feel on his deformed mouth the pressure of divine lips, was exquisite and maddening.  Before this woman, full of enigmas, all else faded away in his mind.  The remembrance of Dea struggled in the shadows with weak cries.  There is an antique bas-relief representing the Sphinx devouring a Cupid.  The wings of the sweet celestial are bleeding between the fierce, grinning fangs.

Did Gwynplaine love this woman?  Has man, like the globe, two poles?  Are we, on our inflexible axis, a moving sphere, a star when seen from afar, mud when seen more closely, in which night alternates with day?  Has the heart two aspects—­one on which its love is poured forth in light; the other in darkness?  Here a woman of light, there a woman of the sewer.  Angels are necessary.  Is it possible that demons are also essential?  Has the soul the wings of the bat?  Does twilight fall fatally for all?  Is sin an integral and inevitable part of our destiny?  Must we accept evil as part and portion of our whole?  Do we inherit sin as a debt?  What awful subjects for thought!

Yet a voice tells us that weakness is a crime.  Gwynplaine’s feelings are not to be described.  The flesh, life, terror, lust, an overwhelming intoxication of spirit, and all the shame possible to pride.  Was he about to succumb?

She repeated, “I love you!” and flung her frenzied arms around him.  Gwynplaine panted.

Suddenly close at hand there rang, clear and distinct, a little bell.  It was the little bell inside the wall.  The duchess, turning her head, said,—­