Sacrifice

he most persistent w

ic damsel, that he called a bayadere, languishing on a balcony. His thin, sallow little face bent close to th

orated with references to flowers turned to dust, setting suns that would n

, he always showed up

cuous by some highly pessimistic theories, and had tried the Byronic gesture. The

in every aspiration except this love of his. Whenever she refused him he sailed away, after threatening to plunge into some wild, dramatic waste, but always compromising on the easiest, beate

ody, dreamed of physical str

e wa

on a figured veil to blur her blush of shame, she slipped away to visit the soothsayers that fashionable women patronized. In a shadowy

she had never met, but whose likeness, singular amid innumerable presentmen

who have suffered hardship and derived extraordinary thoughts from solitude. It pleased her to note that his was the brow of a scholar-he had written learned volumes about the jungle peoples, was the most picturesque authority on the Islamic wor

little-known Oriental cities, the deadly richness of equatorial forests, peopled by human beasts whose claws were hammered

or being of unalterable health and sanity, perhaps protected because of a grand destiny still unreveal

she would whisper, staring at the liken

bizarre fancies and actions may

I exist? Then I mus

that had never been so strongly focused upon a definite personality found their centering point in him, whose imagined nature seemed to be so emphatically what she needed

otionless and tense, she rose wearily, with

erent men made love to her, once or twice, maybe at a conjunction of exquisite scenery, music, and impatience, of confused longings and eloquent persuasion

monotonous, she went to a week-end party