And he thought of
her as pure, chaste; the white flame which was known to him alone, the
flame of her sex, was a white flower of snow to his mind. She was a
wonderful white snow-flower, which he had desired infinitely. And now
he was dying with all his ideas and interpretations intact. They would
only collapse when the breath left his body. Till then they would be
pure truths for him. Only death would show the perfect completeness of
the lie. Till death, she was his white snow-flower. He had subdued her,
and her subjugation was to him an infinite chastity in her, a virginity
which he could never break, and which dominated him as by a spell.
She had let go the outer world, but within herself she was unbroken and
unimpaired. She only sat in her room like a moping, dishevelled hawk,
motionless, mindless. Her children, for whom she had been so fierce in
her youth, now meant scarcely anything to her. She had lost all that,
she was quite by herself. Only Gerald, the gleaming, had some existence
for her.
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