At that moment she seemed as sacred and chaste to me in her unveiled
beauty, as did the divinity of long ago. I sank down on my knees
before her, and devoutly pressed my lips on her foot.
My soul which had been storm-tossed only a little while earlier,
suddenly was perfectly calm, and I now felt no element of cruelty in
Wanda.
She slowly descended the stairs, and I could watch her with a
calmness in which not a single atom of torment or desire was
intermingled. I could see her plunge into and rise out of the
crystalline water, and the wavelets which she herself raised played
about her like tender lovers.
Our nihilistic aesthetician is right when he says: a real apple is
more beautiful than a painted one, and a living woman is more
beautiful than a Venus of stone.
And when she left the bath, and the silvery drops and the roseate
light rippled down her body, I was seized with silent rapture. I
wrapped the linen sheets about her, drying her glorious body. The
calm bliss remained with me, even now when one foot upon me as upon
a footstool, she rested on the cushions in her large velvet cloak.
The lithe sables nestled desirously against her cold marble-like body.
Her left arm on which she supported herself lay like a sleeping swan
in the dark fur of the sleeve, while her left hand played carelessly
with the whip.
By chance my look fell on the massive mirror on the wall opposite,
and I cried out, for I saw the two of us in its golden frame as in
a picture.
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