“Yes; I know now that this is true.... See, Ettarre! Yonder woman is furtively coloring her cheeks with a little wet red rag. She does not wish to seem pale—or is it that she wishes to look her best?—in the moment of death.... Ettarre, my love for you whom I could not ever find, was not of earth, and I could not transfer it to an earthly woman. The lively hues, the lovely curvings and the fragrant tender flesh of earth’s women were deft to cast their spells; but presently I knew this magic was only of the body. It might be I was honoring divinity; but it was certain that even in such case I was doing so by posturing before my divinity’s effigy in tinted clay. Besides, it is not possible to know with any certainty what is going on in the round glossy little heads of women. ‘I hide no secrets from you, because I love you,’ say they?—eh, and their love may be anything from a mild preference to a flat lie. And so, I came finally to concede that all women are creatures of like frailties and limitations and reserves as myself, and I was most poignantly lonely when I was luckiest in love. Once only, in my life in the flesh, it seemed to me that a woman, whom I had abandoned, held in her hand the sigil visibly. That memory has often troubled me, Ettarre. It may be that this woman could have given me what I sought everywhere in vain. But I did not know this until it was too late, until the chance and the woman’s life alike were wasted.... And so, I grew apathetic, senseless and without any spurring aspiration, seeing that all human beings are so securely locked in the prison of their flesh.” “When immortals visit earth it is necessary they assume the appearance of some animal. Very long ago, as we have seen, Horvendile, that secret was discovered, which so many myths veil thinly: and have we not learned, too, that the animal’s fleshly body is a disguise which it is possible to put aside?” “That knowledge, so fearfully purchased at the Sabbat, still troubles me, Ettarre.... Monsieur le Prince, I regret the circumstance, but—as you see—my snuff-box is quite empty. Ah, but yes, as you very justly observe, rappee, repose and rationality are equally hard to come by in these mad days.... Is that not droll, Ettarre? This unvenerable old Prince de Gâtinais—once Grand Duke of Noumaria, you remember—has been guilty in his career of every iniquity and meanness and cowardice: now, facing instant death, he finds time to think of snuff and phrase-making.... But—to go back a little—I had thought the Sabbat would be so different! One imagined there would be cauldrons, and hags upon prancing broomsticks, and a black goat, of course—” “How much more terrible it is—and how beautiful!” “Yet—even now I may not touch you, Ettarre.”