Midnight had just struck in the five parishes of Southwark, with the breaks and differences of tone of their various bells.  Gwynplaine was dreaming of Dea.  Of whom else should he dream?  But that evening, feeling singularly troubled, and full of a charm which was at the same time a pang, he thought of Dea as a man thinks of a woman.  He reproached himself for this.  It seemed to be failing in respect to her.  The husband’s attack was forming dimly within him.  Sweet and imperious impatience!  He was crossing the invisible frontier, on this side of which is the virgin, on the other, the wife.  He questioned himself anxiously.  A blush, as it were, overspread his mind.  The Gwynplaine of long ago had been transformed, by degrees, unconsciously in a mysterious growth.  His old modesty was becoming misty and uneasy.  We have an ear of light, into which speaks the spirit; and an ear of darkness, into which speaks the instinct.  Into the latter strange voices were making their proposals.  However pure-minded may be the youth who dreams of love, a certain grossness of the flesh eventually comes between his dream and him.  Intentions lose their transparency.  The unavowed desire implanted by nature enters into his conscience.  Gwynplaine felt an indescribable yearning of the flesh, which abounds in all temptation, and Dea was scarcely flesh.  In this fever, which he knew to be unhealthy, he transfigured Dea into a more material aspect, and tried to exaggerate her seraphic form into feminine loveliness.  It is thou, O woman, that we require.

Love comes not to permit too much of paradise.  It requires the fevered skin, the troubled life, the unbound hair, the kiss electrical and irreparable, the clasp of desire.  The sidereal is embarrassing, the ethereal is heavy.  Too much of the heavenly in love is like too much fuel on a fire:  the flame suffers from it.  Gwynplaine fell into an exquisite nightmare; Dea to be clasped in his arms—­Dea clasped in them!  He heard nature in his heart crying out for a woman.  Like a Pygmalion in a dream modelling a Galathea out of the azure, in the depths of his soul he worked at the chaste contour of Dea—­a contour with too much of heaven, too little of Eden.  For Eden is Eve, and Eve was a female, a carnal mother, a terrestrial nurse; the sacred womb of generations; the breast of unfailing milk; the rocker of the cradle of the newborn world, and wings are incompatible with the bosom of woman.  Virginity is but the hope of maternity.  Still, in Gwynplaine’s dreams, Dea, until now, had been enthroned above flesh.  Now, however, he made wild efforts in thought to draw her downwards by that thread, sex, which ties every girl to earth.  Not one of those birds is free.  Dea, like all the rest, was within this law; and Gwynplaine, though he scarcely acknowledged it, felt a vague desire that she should submit to it.  This desire possessed him in spite of himself, and with an ever-recurring relapse.  He pictured Dea as woman.  He came