Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to anatomize him beset her. The ground of it was, that she found him in her likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling, now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked self-knowledge, and of her saying: ‘That is like me: that is very like me: that is terribly like’: up to the point where the comparison wooed her no longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped her so shrewdly as to force her to say: ‘That is he, not I’: and the vivisected youth received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at a touch. It was given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him. Anatomy is the title for the operation, because the probing of herself in another, with the liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her, allowed her while unhurt to feel that she prosecuted her researches in a dead body. The moment her strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank under a stroke of pain, she abstained from carving, and simultaneously conscious that he lived, she was kind to him. ‘This love of yours, Marko--is it so deep?’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You think me the highest and best?’ ‘You are.’ ‘So deep that you could bear anything from me?’ ‘Try me!’ ‘Unfaithfulness?’ ‘You would be you!’ ‘Do you not say that because you cannot suspect evil of me?’ ‘Let me only see you!’ ‘You are sure that happiness would not smother it?’ ‘Has it done so yet?’ ‘Though you know I am a serpent to that man’s music?’ ‘Ah, heaven! Oh!--do not say music. Yes! though anything!’ ‘And if ever you were to witness the power of his just breathing to me?’ ‘I would.... Ah!’ ‘What? If you saw his music working the spell?--even the first notes of his prelude!’ ‘I would wait’ ‘It might be for long.’ ‘I would eat my heart.’ ‘Bitter! bitter!’ ‘I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you.’ She had a seizure of the nerves. The likeness between them was, she felt, too flamingly keen to be looked at further. She reached to the dim idea of some such nauseous devotion, and took a shot in her breast as she did so, and abjured it, and softened to her victim. Clotilde opened her arms, charming away her wound, as she soothed him, both by the act of soothing and the reflection that she could not be so very like one whom she pitied and consoled.