Ecstasy by Louis Couperus Page B

She saw him for the first time since the self-revelation which had flashed upon her astounded sense. And when he came she felt the singularly rapturous feeling that in her eyes he was a demi-god, that he perfected himself in her imagination, that everything in him was good. Now that he sat there before her, she saw him for the first time, and she saw that he was physically beautiful. The strength of his body was exalted into the strength of a young god, broad, and yet slender, sinewed as with marble sinews of a statue; all this seeming so strange beneath the modernness of his frock coat. She saw his face completely for the first time. The cut of it was Roman, the head that of a Roman emperor, with its sensual profile, itssmall full mouth, living red under the brown gold of his curled moustache. The forehead was low, the hair cut very close, like an enveloping black casque, and over that forehead, with its one line, hovered sadness, like a mist of age, strangely contradicting the wanton youthfulness of mouth and chin. And then his eyes, which she already knew, his eyes of mystery, small and deep set, with the deeper depth of their pupils, which seemed now to veil themselves and then again to look out.
    But strangest was, that from all his beauty, from all his being, from all his attitude, with his hands folded between his knees, there came out to her a magnetism, which dominated her, drawing her irresistibly towards him; as if she had suddenly, from the first moment of her self-revelation, become his, to serve him in all things. She felt this magnetism attracting her so violently that every power in her melted into heaviness and weakness. A weakness as if he might take her and carry her away, anywhere, wherever he wished; a weakness as if she no longer possessed her own thoughts, as if she had become nothing – apart from him.
    She felt this intensely; and then came the very strangest of all, when he continued to sit there, at a respectful distance, his eyes bearing a respectful look, his voice falling in respectful accents. That was the strangest of all, that she saw him beneath her, while she felt him above her; that she wished to be his inferior, and he seemed to consider her higher than himself. She did not knowhow suddenly she so intensely realised this, but she did realise it, and it was the first pain love gave her.
    “You are kind not to be angry with me,” he began.
    There was often something caressing in his voice; it was not clear, and now and then even a little broken, but this just gave it a certain charm of quality.
    “Why?” she asked.
    “In the first place I did wrong to pay you that visit. Secondly, I was ill-mannered at Mrs Hoze’s dinner.”
    “A whole catalogue of sins!” she laughed.
    “Surely!” he continued, “and you are very good to bear me no malice.”
    “Perhaps that is because I always hear so much that is good about you at Dolf’s.”
    “Have you never noticed anything odd in Dolf?” he asked.
    “No; what do you mean?”
    “Has it never struck you that he has more of an eye for the great combinations of political questions than for the details of his own surroundings?”
    She looked at him, smiling, astonished.
    “Yes,” she said. “You are right. You know him well.”
    “Oh, we have known one another from boyhood. It is curious; he never sees the things that lie close to his hand; he does not penetrate them. He is intellectually far-sighted.”
    “Yes,” she assented.
    “He does not know his wife, nor his daughters, norJules. He does not see what they have in them. He identifies each of them by means of a cypher fixed in his mind, which he forms out of the two most prominent traits of character, generally a little opposed. Mrs Van Attema seems to him to have a heart of gold, but to be not very practical: so much for her. Jules: a musical genius, but an untractable boy: settled.”
    “Yes, he does not go very deeply into character,” she said. “For there is a great deal