Suddenly she found herself
thinking of the fanatical religious performance she had seen with Hadj
on the night when she had ridden out to watch the moon rise. She saw in
imagination the bowing bodies, the foaming mouths, the glassy eyes
of the young priests of the Sahara. She saw the spikes behind their
eyeballs, the struggling scorpions descending into their throats, the
flaming coals under their arm-pits, the nails driven into their heads.
She heard them growling as they saw the glass, like hungry beasts at the
sight of meat. And all this was to them religion. This madness was
their conception of worship. A voice seemed to whisper to her: "And your
madness?"

It was like the voice that whispered to Androvsky in the cemetery of
El-Largani, "Come out with me into that world, that beautiful world
which God made for men. Why do you reject it?"

For a moment she saw all religions, all the practices, the renunciations
of the religions of the world, as varying forms of madness. She compared
the self-denial of the monk with the fetish worship of the savage. And
a wild thrill of something that was almost like joy rushed through her,
the joy that sometimes comes to the unbelievers when they are about to
commit some act which they feel would be contrary to God's will if there
were a God. It was a thrill of almost insolent human emancipation. The
soul cried out: "I have no master. When I thought I had a master I was
mad. Now I am sane."

But it passed almost as it came, like a false thing slinking from the
sunlight, and Domini bowed her head in the obscurity of Count Anteoni's
thinking-place and returned to her true self. That moment had been like
the moment upon the tower when she saw below her the Jewess dancing upon
the roof for the soldiers, a black speck settling for an instant upon
whiteness, then carried away by a purifying wind. She knew that she
would always be subject to such moments so long as she was a human
being, that there would always be in her blood something that was
self-willed. Otherwise, would she not be already in Paradise? She sat
and prayed for strength in the battle of life, that could never be
anything else but a battle.

At last something within her told her to look up, to look out through
the window-space into the garden. She had not heard a step, but she
knew that Androvsky was approaching, and, as she looked up, she prepared
herself for a sight that would be terrible. She remembered his face whe