th the sick man
moved her strangely. She raised his head to give him food,
and it was heavy against her hand; when she had fed him she
wiped his sensual mouth and his red beard. She washed his limbs;
they were covered with thick hair; and when she dried
his hands, even in his weakness they were strong and sinewy.
His fingers were long; they were the capable, fashioning
fingers of the artist; and I know not what troubling thoughts
they excited in her. He slept very quietly, without a
movement, so that he might have been dead, and he was like
some wild creature of the woods, resting after a long chase;
and she wondered what fancies passed through his dreams.
Did he dream of the nymph flying through the woods of Greece with
the satyr in hot pursuit? She fled, swift of foot and
desperate, but he gained on her step by step, till she felt
his hot breath on her neck; and still she fled silently, and
silently he pursued, and when at last he seized her was it
terror that thrilled her heart or was it ecstasy?

Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel grip of appetite.
Perhaps she hated Strickland still, but she hungered for him,
and everything that had made up her life till then became of
no account. She ceased to be a woman, complex, kind and
petulant, considerate and thoughtless; she was a Maenad.
She was desire.

But perhaps this is very fanciful; and it may be that she was
merely bored with her husband and went to Strickland out of a
callous curiosity. She may have had no particular feeling for
him, but succumbed to his wish from propinquity or idleness,
to find then that she was powerless in a snare of her own
contriving. How did I know what were the thoughts and
emotions behind that placid brow and those cool gray eyes?

But if one could be certain of nothing in dealing with
creatures so incalculable as human beings, there were
explanations of Blanche Stroeve's behaviour which were at all
events plausible. On the other hand, I did not understand
Strickland at all. I racked my brain, but could in no way
account for an action so contrary to my conception of him.
It was not strange that he should so heartlessly have betrayed
his friends' confidence, nor that he hesitated not at all to
gratify a whim at the cost of another's misery. That was in
his character. He was a man without any conception of
gratitude. He had no compassion. The emotions common to most
of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to