troy it. If you can't see it yourself, why try to
debar me?' But in reality, he had destroyed it for her, she was
straining after a dead effect.

'One day,' he said, softly, looking up at her, 'I shall destroy YOU, as
you stand looking at the sunset; because you are such a liar.'

There was a soft, voluptuous promise to himself in the words. She was
chilled but arrogant.

'Ha!' she said. 'I am not afraid of your threats!' She denied herself
to him, she kept her room rigidly private to herself. But he waited on,
in a curious patience, belonging to his yearning for her.

'In the end,' he said to himself with real voluptuous promise, 'when it
reaches that point, I shall do away with her.' And he trembled
delicately in every limb, in anticipation, as he trembled in his most
violent accesses of passionate approach to her, trembling with too much
desire.

She had a curious sort of allegiance with Loerke, all the while, now,
something insidious and traitorous. Gerald knew of it. But in the
unnatural state of patience, and the unwillingness to harden himself
against her, in which he found himself, he took no notice, although her
soft kindliness to the other man, whom he hated as a noxious insect,
made him shiver again with an access of the strange shuddering that
came over him repeatedly.

He left her alone only when he went skiing, a sport he loved, and which
she did not practise. The he seemed to sweep out of life, to be a
projectile into the beyond. And often, when he went away, she talked to
the little German sculptor. They had an invariable topic, in their art.

They were almost of the same ideas. He hated Mestrovic, was not
satisfied with the Futurists, he liked the West African wooden figures,
the Aztec art, Mexican and Central American. He saw the grotesque, and
a curious sort of mechanical motion intoxicated him, a confusion in
nature. They had a curious game with each other, Gudrun and Loerke, of
infinite suggestivity, strange and leering, as if they had some
esoteric understanding of life, that they alone were initiated into the
fearful central secrets, that the world dared not know. Their whole
correspondence was in a strange, barely comprehensible suggestivity,
they kindled themselves at the subtle lust of the Egyptians or the
Mexicans. The whole game was one of subtle inter-suggestivity, and they
wanted to keep it on the plane of suggestion. From their verbal and
physical nuances they got the highest satis