But thou dost suck the marrow from my bones! Thou crook’st my back, and rob’st my eyes of their last gleam of youth. You claim too much of me with your inhuman coyness, you wear me out with your unmoving limbs!--It’s you or I!--and _I_ who have prevailed! If I should count them up--those vanished ones with all of whom I have fought this same fight here!--Psyche by Thumann--one legacy yet from that dried-up Mlle. Angelique, that rattlesnake in the Eden of my childhood; Io by Correggio; Galathea by Lossow; then an Amor of Bouguereau’s; Ada by J. van Beers--that Ada whom I had to abduct from a secret drawer in father’s desk, to add her to my harem; a quivering, thrilling Leda by Makart, that I found by chance among my brother’s college lecture-notes; seven, O thou doomed in thy perfect flower, who have rushed before thee down this path into Tartarus! Let that give thee comfort, and seek not to heighten my pangs into agony with these supplicating looks! Thou diest not for =thy= sins, but for =mine=! Need to defend myself against myself drives me with bleeding heart to do this seventh murder on a mate. There =is= something tragic in the rôle of Bluebeard. I guess that all his murdered wives together suffered less than he did in the strangling of each single one. But my conscience will grow calmer and my body stronger when thou, she-devil, residest no longer in the red-silk cushions of my jewel-casket. Then in thy stead I will have the Lorelei of Bodenhausen or the Forsaken Lass of Linger or the Loni of Defregger occupy that voluptuous pleasure-chamber--provided I shall have recovered the quicker for this! A bare three months more, perhaps, and your unveiled Jehoshaphat, sweet soul, would have begun devouring my poor brain as the sun a butter-ball. It was high time to effect the separation from bed and board! Brrr! I feel a Heliogabalus in me! Moritura me salutat!--O girl, girl, why do you press your knees together?--why still even now,--in the face of inscrutable eternity?--One spasm, and I will let thee live! One feminine movement, one sign of sensuality, of sympathy, girl! and I will frame thee in gold and hang thee above my bed. Art thou not conscious that it is thy =purity=, nothing more, begets my excesses? Woe, woe to the unhuman! Anyone can see that she’s had the advantage of a model education!--Well, =so have _I_ too=. Hast thou prayed to-night, Desdemona? My heart contracts in convulsions---- Silly!--Holy St. Agnes died for her continence too, and was not half so naked as thou!--One more kiss on your virginal body, your child-like, budding breast, your sweetly rounded--cruel, unyielding knees.... It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars! It is the cause!---- [_The picture falls into the depths. He shuts the lid._] CURTAIN SCENE IV.--_A hayloft. Murky light, the smell of fresh hay_, MELCHIOR _lying in it_. WENDLA _comes up the ladder_.