obstinate forehead, wrinkled with pain; his hands--the
true index of the soul--were clasped, the fingers interlocked, wiry
fingers agile with pen and piano. "Hear me out, Olivie," he commanded.
"I've been too good a friend to dismiss because I've offended your sense
of propriety"--she made an indignant gesture--"well, your idea of
fidelity. But there is the other side of the slate: I've been a faithful
slave, I've worked long years for my reward; and disciple of Nietzsche
as I am, I have never attempted to assert my claims." "Your claims!" she
uttered scornfully. "Yes, my claims, the claims of a man who sees his
love sacrificed to miserable deception. Sit still! You must hear all
now. I loved poetry but I loved you better. It was for that I endured
everything. I spoke of my black soul--it is black, I've poisoned it with
music, slowly poisoned it until now it must be deadened. Like the opium
eater I began with small doses of innocent music: I absorbed Haydn,
Mozart. When Mozart became too mild I turned to Beethoven; from
Beethoven to the mad stuff of Schubert, Schumann, Chopin--sick souls
all of them. They sustained me until even they failed to intoxicate. My
nerves needed music that would bite--I found it in Liszt, Wagner and
Tschaikowsky; and like absinthe-drinkers I was wretched without my daily
draughts." "You drink absinthe also, do you not?" she asked in her
coldest manner. He did not notice her. "My soul gradually took on the
color of the evil I sucked from all this music. Why? I can't say;
perhaps because a poet has nothing in common with music--it usually
kills the poetry in him. That is why I wonder what music Edvard Munch
hears when he paints such pictures. It must be dire! Then Richard
Strauss swept the torrid earth and my thirsty soul slaked itself in his
tumultuous seas. At last I felt sure I had met my match. Your husband
was like a child in my hands." She listened eagerly. "I did with him
what I wished--but to please you I wrote 'The Iron Virgin.'" ...

"The book," she calmly corrected. "As I wrote 'The Iron Virgin' I
thought of you: You were my iron virgin, you, the wife of Patel. Will
you hear the truth at last, the truth about a soul damned by music?
Patel knew it. He promised me on his death-bed--" Olivie pushed by him
and stood in the doorway. He only stared at her. "You are an Oread," he
mumbled, "you still pine for your lost Narcissus till nothing is left
of you but a voice--a voice which echoes him