Suddenly it was midnight. The muffled woman rose, turned toward the settle, and slowly unwound the long swathes that hid her face: they dropped on the ground, and she stepped over them. The feet of the princess were toward the hearth; Mara went to her head, and turning, stood behind it. Then I saw her face. It was lovely beyond speech--white and sad, heart-and-soul sad, but not unhappy, and I knew it never could be unhappy. Great tears were running down her cheeks: she wiped them away with her robe; her countenance grew very still, and she wept no more. But for the pity in every line of her expression, she would have seemed severe. She laid her hand on the head of the princess--on the hair that grew low on the forehead, and stooping, breathed on the sallow brow. The body shuddered. “Will you turn away from the wicked things you have been doing so long?” said Mara gently. The princess did not answer. Mara put the question again, in the same soft, inviting tone. Still there was no sign of hearing. She spoke the words a third time. Then the seeming corpse opened its mouth and answered, its words appearing to frame themselves of something else than sound.--I cannot shape the thing further: sounds they were not, yet they were words to me. “I will not,” she said. “I will be myself and not another!” “Alas, you are another now, not yourself! Will you not be your real self?” “I will be what I mean myself now.” “If you were restored, would you not make what amends you could for the misery you have caused?” “I would do after my nature.” “You do not know it: your nature is good, and you do evil!” “I will do as my Self pleases--as my Self desires.” “You will do as the Shadow, overshadowing your Self inclines you?” “I will do what I will to do.” “You have killed your daughter, Lilith!” “I have killed thousands. She is my own!” “She was never yours as you are another’s.” “I am not another’s; I am my own, and my daughter is mine.” “Then, alas, your hour is come!” “I care not. I am what I am; no one can take from me myself!” “You are not the Self you imagine.” “So long as I feel myself what it pleases me to think myself, I care not. I am content to be to myself what I would be. What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am. My own thought makes me me; my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me!” “But another has made you, and can compel you to see what you have made yourself. You will not be able much longer to look to yourself anything but what he sees you! You will not much longer have satisfaction in the thought of yourself. At this moment you are aware of the coming change!” “No one ever made me. I defy that Power to unmake me from a free woman! You are his slave, and I defy you! You may be able to torture me--I do not know, but you shall not compel me to anything against my will!”