with a strange desire. Ah, if only he had asked HER to
subserve him, to be his slave! She shuddered with desire.

'You see I can't--'

'But exactly in what does--'

They had both begun at once, they both stopped. Then, Hermione,
assuming priority of speech, resumed as if wearily:

'To what does he want you to submit?'

'He says he wants me to accept him non-emotionally, and finally--I
really don't know what he means. He says he wants the demon part of
himself to be mated--physically--not the human being. You see he says
one thing one day, and another the next--and he always contradicts
himself--'

'And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,' said
Hermione slowly.

'Yes,' cried Ursula. 'As if there were no-one but himself concerned.
That makes it so impossible.'

But immediately she began to retract.

'He insists on my accepting God knows what in HIM,' she resumed. 'He
wants me to accept HIM as--as an absolute--But it seems to me he
doesn't want to GIVE anything. He doesn't want real warm intimacy--he
won't have it--he rejects it. He won't let me think, really, and he
won't let me FEEL--he hates feelings.'

There was a long pause, bitter for Hermione. Ah, if only he would have
made this demand of her? Her he DROVE into thought, drove inexorably
into knowledge--and then execrated her for it.

'He wants me to sink myself,' Ursula resumed, 'not to have any being of
my own--'

'Then why doesn't he marry an odalisk?' said Hermione in her mild
sing-song, 'if it is that he wants.' Her long face looked sardonic and
amused.

'Yes,' said Ursula vaguely. After all, the tiresome thing was, he did
not want an odalisk, he did not want a slave. Hermione would have been
his slave--there was in her a horrible desire to prostrate herself
before a man--a man who worshipped her, however, and admitted her as
the supreme thing. He did not want an odalisk. He wanted a woman to
TAKE something from him, to give herself up so much that she could take
the last realities of him, the last facts, the last physical facts,
physical and unbearable.

And if she did, would he acknowledge her? Would he be able to
acknowledge her through everything, or would he use her just as his
instrument, use her for his own private satisfaction, not admitting
her? That was what the other men had done. They had wanted their own
show, and they would not admit her, they turned all she was into
nothingness. Just as Hermione now betray