The cadences that came like waves out of the moonlit silence ceased. His visage was white and numb. One could not tell if the deep, oblong eyes were seeing or if they were blind. Did he breathe? Did the bare porcelain chest move? He might have been some hypnotic image, drowning her resentment in sleep. But the rim of the moon came suddenly into the doorway, making a change, releasing her from a spell. It was intolerable that he should despise the memory of their intimacy, and reject all she had given him of her mind and senses. “Why, why did you kiss me that time?” she asked, in a storm of protest. “I do not remember,” said the calm voice. Now he seemed immensely foreign and impenetrable, as if she had been in love with a creature. Fiercely she remembered the Jupiter swan that had made love to her that first morning, in a fit of inexplicable desire. Had it been like that with Yuan? No communion of spirit at all? Her ideas about him had been fictions of the mind. The angry desire to be kissed once again by that fiction whose mouth was a spot of fire at once consumed her. She longed in a storm of resentment to wake his senses again, to see those flower-lips crumpled with the fire of passion, to see them grey with the ashes of it. But what art had she to tempt him with? Or, indeed, what art could have equalled the natural beauty of her shape, the fragile and intoxicating bloom and mystery of her person, the troubled loveliness of her mouth, of her eyes? Troubled, certainly, they were, but in them was a gleam of that unstriving and creative energy on which her lover meditated. In those subtle and moving relations between shoulder and breast, in the ineffable curves of her body, shone openly his uncreated principle from which all order and beauty proceeds. These, maybe, were his thoughts, and evidently he perceived hers. “That which is accidental in your loveliness has no force with me. Only the eternal has force. The eternal shines in you.” Once again, amazingly, there streamed up in her a fountain of mockery, but the icy reality of his renunciation froze her mockery at her lips. “I believe,” she said, hesitatingly—“I believe that I am more of an adept than Yuan, for I could laugh. I could laugh like old Wang and the Rishi. I am less bound to the world and to passion than Yuan if I can laugh. To renounce is to be bound by the tie of renunciation.” But no sign of emotion or any response appeared on his face, and swiftly once more she fell under the hypnotic spell of his stillness. He could not be mocked into life. She had to meet him in the reality in which he rested. “I am a woman,” she said. “I see no opposition between your unnameable and my now. Time may surely be made delicious, for the unnameable must be in time, too, and in the usage of love. It certainly is for a woman.”