pure, bluish fire,
from the core of his soul. It was an excruciating, but also an intensely
gratifying sensation.

This night he slept with a deeper obliviousness than before. But ah, as
it grew towards morning how he wished he could be alone.

They must stay together till the day was light. And she seemed to love
clinging to him and curling strangely on his breast. He could never
reconcile it with her who was a hostess entertaining her guests. How
could she now in a sort of little ecstasy curl herself and nestle
herself on his, Aaron's breast, tangling his face all over with her
hair. He verily believed that this was what she really wanted of him: to
curl herself on his naked breast, to make herself small, small, to feel
his arms around her, while he himself was remote, silent, in some
way inaccessible. This seemed almost to make her beside herself with
gratification. But why, why? Was it because he was one of her own race,
and she, as it were, crept right home to him?

He did not know. He only knew it had nothing to do with him: and that,
save out of _complaisance_, he did not want it. It simply blasted his
own central life. It simply blighted him.

And she clung to him closer. Strange, she was afraid of him! Afraid of
him as of a fetish! Fetish afraid, and fetish-fascinated! Or was her
fear only a delightful game of cat and mouse? Or was the fear genuine,
and the delight the greater: a sort of sacrilege? The fear, and the
dangerous, sacrilegious power over that which she feared.

In some way, she was not afraid of him at all. In some other way she
used him as a mere magic implement, used him with the most amazing
priestess-craft. Himself, the individual man which he was, this she
treated with an indifference that was startling to him.

He forgot, perhaps, that this was how he had treated her. His famous
desire for her, what had it been but this same attempt to strike a magic
fire out of her, for his own ecstasy. They were playing the same game
of fire. In him, however, there was all the time something hard and
reckless and defiant, which stood apart. She was absolutely gone in
her own incantations. She was absolutely gone, like a priestess utterly
involved in her terrible rites. And he was part of the ritual only, God
and victim in one. God and victim! All the time, God and victim. When
his aloof soul realised, amid the welter of incantation, how he was
being used,--not as himself but as something quite differ