He had not lost a gesture or a word of all this scene, and when everything was over, he remained motionless for a long time, harassed by new torments, passionate, irresolute. He had thought himself quite cured of his madness of the night before, and had believed that henceforth nothing could throw him a second time into the ardent shadow of this strange woman. But he had counted without her. Women! O women! if you wish to be loved, show yourselves, return, present yourselves! The emotion he had felt on her entrance was so entire and overwhelming that it was out of the question to dream of struggling against it by a violent effort of the will. Demetrios was bound like a barbarian slave to a triumphal car. The idea of escape was an illusion. Without knowing it, and quite naturally, she had made him her captive. He had seen her coming in the distance, for she wore the same yellow robe she had had on the quay. She walked with low, supple steps and with languid undulations of the hips. She had come straight to him, as if she had divined him behind the stone. He realised from the first instant that he was ready once more to fall at her feet. When she drew the mirror of polished bronze from her girdle, she looked at herself in it for the last time before giving it to the priest, and the brilliancy of her eyes became stupefying. When, in order to take her copper comb, she laid her hand upon her hair and raised her bended arm, in conformity with the gesture of the Graces, the beautiful line of her body revealed itself under the tissue, and the sun illumined a tiny dew of brilliant sweat under her armpit. Finally, when, in order to lift up and unbuckle her necklace of heavy emeralds, she parted the pleated silk that veiled her double bosom down to the sweet shade-hidden place that admits of nothing more than a bouquet being slipped into it, Demetrios was seized with such a frenzied desire to put his lips upon it and tear off the whole dress that . . . But Chrysis began to speak. She spoke, and every one of her words was torture to him. She seemed wantonly to insist and enlarge upon the prostitution of the vase of beauty that she was, white as the statue itself, and full of overflowing gold streaming down in a shower of hair. She told how her door was open to the lounging passer-by, how her body was delivered over to the contemplation of the unworthy, how the task of firing her cheeks with the flush of passion was committed to clumsy children. She spoke of the venal fatigue of her eyes, of her lips hired by the night, of her hair entrusted to brutal hands, of her divinity crucified. Even the exceeding facility of her access was a charm in Demetrios’s eyes, though he was resolved to use it solely for his own benefit and to close the door behind him. For it is profoundly true that a woman only reaches the utmost limit of her seductiveness when she gives occasion for jealousy.