“Juliet, I will not listen to any more such foolish words.  Either tell me plainly what you mean, that I may convince you what a goose you are, or be quiet and go to sleep again.”

“Can it be that after all it does not signify so much?” she said aloud, but only to herself, meditating in the light of a little glow-worm of hope.  “Oh if it could be so!  And what is it really so much?  I have not murdered any body!—­I will tell you, Paul!”

She drew his head closer down, laid her lips to his ear, gave a great gasp, and whispered two or three words.  He started up, sundering at once the bonds of her clasped hands, cast one brief stare at her, turned, walked, with a great quick stride to his dressing-room, entered, and closed the door.

As if with one rush of a fell wind, they were ages, deserts, empty star-spaces apart!  She was outside the universe, in the cold frenzy of infinite loneliness.  The wolves of despair were howling in her.  But Paul was in the next room!  There was only the door between them!  She sprung from her bed and ran to a closet.  The next moment she appeared in her husband’s dressing-room.

Paul sat sunk together in his chair, his head hanging forward, his teeth set, his whole shape, in limb and feature, carrying the show of profound, of irrecoverable injury.  He started to his feet when she entered.  She did not once lift her eyes to his face, but sunk on her knees before him, hurriedly slipped her night-gown from her shoulders to her waist, and over her head, bent toward the floor, held up to him a riding-whip.

They were baleful stars that looked down on that naked world beneath them.

To me scarce any thing is so utterly pathetic as the back.  That of an animal even is full of sad suggestion.  But the human back!—­It is the other, the dark side of the human moon; the blind side of the being, defenseless, and exposed to every thing; the ignorant side, turned toward the abyss of its unknown origin; the unfeatured side, eyeless and dumb and helpless—­the enduring animal of the marvelous commonwealth, to be given to the smiter, and to bend beneath the burden—­lovely in its patience and the tender forms of its strength.

An evil word, resented by the lowest of our sisters, rushed to the man’s lips, but died there in a strangled murmur.

“Paul!” said Juliet, in a voice from whose tone it seemed as if her soul had sunk away, and was crying out of a hollow place of the earth, “take it—­take it.  Strike me.”

He made no reply—­stood utterly motionless, his teeth clenched so hard that he could not have spoken without grinding them.  She waited as motionless, her face bowed to the floor, the whip held up over her head.

“Paul!” she said again, “you saved my life once:  save my soul now.  Whip me and take me again.”

He answered with only a strange unnatural laugh through his teeth.

“Whip me and let me die then,” she said.