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Poem

And there, clad only in a transparent pink négligé, was the ravishing Julia, who danced ever more wildly, ever more rapturously to the exciting beat of that fantastic music: her smooth and slender body twisting itself this way and that, her flesh set a-trembling with a perfumed moistness of utterly over-sensuous awareness and longing. Sin, Oh for sin! (Or am I being too old-fashioned, and are her lips excused of these words if I write, as more of a metaphysical evocation, O, Sin! instead?)

Her parents had, yes that's right separated, They Left Her Behind Them. And as if the dark forces of Fate were working vengeance indirectly upon those who set this bad example, breakers of this marriage (after so many, almost twenty, years); as if in the way of some retribution; there appears, suddenly at one of the windows, out of the blackness of the night the repulsive hairy face of a grey-coated old man. Sweet litle Julia notices nothing, but throws herself in abandon for the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth time upon the soft sofa. And now the great monster—some paltry cat-thief elevated by Destiny to this role—is already forcing an entry. And. his loathsome, grisly face contorted into a grin, he sets upon her. It is nothing less than rape. Rape! Agh, most atrocious act! Terror and delight mingle grotesquely in the creature's pure face . . . Enough of this . . .

At last she was alone in the enormous mansion. Her parents had parted from each other for ever, husband and wife making off in mutually opposing directions.—The splitting asunder of a marriage of which dear Julia had been the only success. And their last gift to her had been the beautiful pink négligé. There, simply locked up inside the mansion—outside it was dark—she danced and danced to the hum of her own generation, all by herself, and simply shivered in sensuous ecstacy. Faster and faster she moved, louder and louder the music blared, she had only her own little body (but what excitement, what glorious longing) for comfort. Why. the chandeliers almost swung in sympathy, a thousand tinkling glassy titillations.

Terror? What am 1 saying? Surprise, that is all; and as the pair are united, pleasure surpasses surprise, and she falls completely in love with the old fellow! and follows him on some mangy path away over the fields into the night, into the world. And that is how she leaves the spacious mansion, which stands there still, in darkness and in silence, deserted. in the night.

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