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THAT NIGHT 285
11 will not try what I know impossible. It would be the part of a fool! '
' Which you have been playing all your life ! Oh, you are hard to teach !'
Defiance reappeared on the face of the princess. She turned her back on Mara, saying,
11 know what you have been tormenting me for! You have not succeeded, nor shall you succeed ! You shall yet find me stronger than you think ! OLwill yei-ba
mistress of myself ! I am still what I have always known__n
myself—queen of Hell, and mistress of the worlds !'
Then came the most fearful thing of all. I did not know what it was ; I knew myself unable to imagine it; I knew only that if it came near me I should die of terror ! I now know that it was Life in Death— life dead, yet existent; and I knew that Lilith had had glimpses, but only glimpses of it before: it had never been with her until now.
She stood as she had turned. Mara went and sat down by the fire. Fearing to stand alone with the princess, and I went also sat again by the hearth. Something began to depart from me. A sense of cold, yet not what we call cold, crept, not into, but out of my being, and pervaded it. The lamp of life and the eternal fire seemed dying together, and I about to be left with nought but the consciousness that I had been alive. Mercifully, bereavement did not go so far, and my thought went back to Lilith.
Something was taking place in her which we did not know. We knew wre did not feel what she felt, but we knew we felt something of the misery it caused her. The thing itself was in her, not in us ; its reflex, her misery, reached us, and was again reflected in us: she was |
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