“I desire you, and that--for me--is stronger than love! You are here because there is no resisting my desires. You may reign as a queen, in this breast, and in my kingdom of Citopomar in Southern Brazil. A queen ruling the virgin forest, its savage beasts, savage and civilized human beings, valleys, rocks and heights. Who in this miserable continent can offer you more?” “No one!” said the Countess, under the secret dominion of the dream which had so rapidly begun its twofold play in her spirit. “You have decided, then, to remain of your own free will?” asked Mabuse. The Countess once more realized her position. She shrank from him, and tried to shelter herself behind the ottoman. She closed her lips firmly, but at the same time she was torn by a conflict within; she desired to go, and at the same time she felt a yearning in some part of her being to remain and to submit. He continued: “If it were like this: a man and a woman see each other for the first time, and in the first glance that they exchange they say to themselves, ‘There is nothing left to me of what I was. Everything has vanished like a dissolving view, and thou, the only one, thou alone remainest. It is inconceivable that there should be a single heart-beat that does not belong to thee.’ It is as if all the races in all the ages had united their powers in these two beings, instead of giving each individual a beggarly portion of it. What a puny creature is man, but if it were the other way with the race he would be the image of God and of creation!” The Countess felt as if a sudden force was stretching her between two poles. She knew that she herself resembled both of them, and yet they were unlike each other. “Must I proceed from the one extreme to the other?” she asked herself, feeling very weary, “or can I remain hovering between them, calm and comfortable, in the warm rays of a sunshine that steals over me so pleasantly?” There was always the inclination to follow the extraordinary and unusual, that she might feel wherein she was most akin to humanity, and yet most herself when surrounded by what did not belong to or affect her. And over her spirit there stole again a feeling as of Paradise, the scent of the Elysian Fields, the songs of enchanting sirens, and it seemed as if the limits of her physical nature were dissolved and, leaving her narrow horizon behind her, she floated as if in ether. “What is happening to me?” she thought, as, struggling with herself, she advanced yet nearer to the vision of Paradise which swam before her eyes.