ion, but at the root of it lay
also an unacknowledged fear which made it even stronger. The man in the
dream might grow more and more like Lamberti, the dream itself might
change, the man might have power over her, instead of submitting to her
will, and he might begin to lead her whither he would. The mere idea was
horrible. It was better to break off, if she could, and to remember the
exquisite Vestal, faithful to her vows, living her life of saintly
purity to the very end, in a love altogether beyond material things. To
let that vision be marred, to suffer that life to be polluted by
mortality, to see the Vestal break the old promises and fall to the
level of an ordinary woman, would be to lose a part of herself and all
that portion of her own existence which had been dearest to her. That
would happen if the man's eyes changed ever so little from what they
were in the dream to the likeness of those living ones that glittered
and were ruthless. For the dream had really changed on the very night
after she had met Lamberti; the loving look had been followed by the one
fierce kiss she could never forget, and though afterwards the rest of
the dream had all come back and had gone on to its end as before, that
one kiss came with it again and again, and in that moment the eyes were
Lamberti's own. It was no wonder that she dared not look into them when
she met him.

And worse still, she had begun to long for it in the dream. She blushed
at the thought. If by any unheard-of outrage Lamberti should ever touch
her lips with his in real life, she knew that she would scream and
struggle and escape, unless his eyes forced her to yield. Then she
should die. She was sure of it. But she would kill herself rather than
be touched by him.

She did not understand exactly, that is to say, scientifically, how she
put herself into the dream state, for it was not a natural sleep, if it
were sleep at all. She did not put out the light and lay her head on the
pillow and lose consciousness, as Lamberti did, and then at once see the
vision. In real sleep, she rarely dreamed at all, and never of what she
always thought of as her other life. To reach that, she had to use her
will, being wide awake, with her eyes open, concentrating her thoughts
at first, as it seemed to her, to a single point, and then abandoning
that point altogether, so that she thought of nothing while she waited.

It was in her power not to begin the process, in other words n