rmastering influence as one surrenders to chloroform, desperately,
but luxuriously.

And when at the invitation of the melody the whole company in the centre
of the floor broke into movement, and the spell was resumed, she lost
all remembrance of that which had passed, and all apprehension of that
which was to come. She lived, passionately and yet languorously, in the
vivid present. Her eyes were level with his shoulder, and they looked
with an entranced gaze along his arm, seeing automatically the faces,
the lights, and the colours which swam in a rapid confused procession
across their field of vision. She did not reason nor recognise. These
fleeting images, appearing and disappearing on the horizon of Arthur's
elbow, produced no effect on her. She had no thoughts. Her entire being
was absorbed in a transport of obedience to the beat of the music, and
to Arthur's directing pressures. She was happy, but her bliss had in it
that element of stinging pain, of intolerable anticipation, which is
seldom absent from a felicity too intense. 'Surely I shall sink down and
die!' said her heart, seeming to faint at the joyous crises of the
music, which rose and fell in tides of varying rapture. Nevertheless she
was determined to drink the cup slowly, to taste every drop of that
sweet and excruciating happiness. She would not utterly abandon herself.
The fear of inanition was only a wayward pretence, after all, and her
strong nature cried out for further tests to prove its fortitude and its
power of dissimulation. As the band slipped into the final section of
the waltz, she wilfully dragged the time, deepening a little the curious
superficial languor which concealed her secrets, and at the same time
increasing her consciousness of Arthur's control. She dreaded now that
what had been intolerable should cease; she wished ardently to avert the
end. The glare of lights, the separate sounds of the instruments, the
slurring of feet on the smooth floor, the lineaments of familiar faces,
all the multitudinous and picturesque detail of gyrating humanity around
her--these phenomena forced themselves on her unwilling perception; and
she tried to push them back, and to spend every faculty in savouring the
ecstasy of that one physical presence which was so close, so enveloping,
and so inexplicably dear. But in vain, in vain! The band rioted through
the last bars of the waltz, a strange, disconcerting silence and inertia
supervened, and Arthur loo