CHAPTER III
So she had come, she had come! She had re-entered the rooms in which
every piece of furniture, every object must retain some memory for her,
and she had said--'I am yours no more, can never be yours again, never!'
and--'Could you suffer to share me with another?'--Yes, she had dared to
fling those words in his face, in that room, in sight of all these
things!
A rush of pain--atrocious, immeasurable, made up of a thousand wounds,
each distinct from the other and one more piercing than the other, came
over him and goaded him to desperation. Passion enveloped him once more
in a thousand tongues of fire, re-kindling in him an inextinguishable
desire for this woman who belonged to him no more, re-awakening in his
memory every smallest detail of past caresses and all the sweet mad
doings of those days. And yet through it all, there persisted the
strange difficulty in identifying that Elena with the Elena of to-day,
who seemed to him altogether another woman, one whom he had never known,
never held in his arms. The torture of his senses was such that he
thought he must die of it. Impurity crept through his blood like a
corroding poison.
The impurity which _then_ the winged flame of the soul had covered with
a sacred veil, had surrounded with a mystery that was half divine,
appeared _now_ without the veil and without the mystery as a mere carnal
lust, a piece of gross sensuality.
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