Her love was a curious mixture of ardent passion and melting, sentimental tenderness.  At one moment the Bacchante, drinking long draughts of love and life from his lips, at another, the innocent girl who sought and found a chaste felicity in the mere rapturous contemplation of the man she adored.  The longer she knew him, the deeper she penetrated into his character, the more did the Bacchante recede and yield her place to the Psyche.  The allegory of Wilhelm’s pastel seemed wrong, her own drawing right.  She was no bloodthirsty Sphinx revelling in human victims, but a harmless little cat purring against the side of the young god.  She was diffident, eager to learn, slow to contradict.  She broke herself of her paradoxes, and concealed her originality.  She liked best to listen while he talked.  He must explain everything to her, enlarge her experience, correct and improve her judgment.  Her favorite words were, give me, show me, tell me!  From morning till night he must give, tell, show.  The sea washed up a medusa to the shore—­give it me!  They surprised a crab in the act of shedding his armor—­show me!  A ride on donkeys to a neighboring village reminded him of a students’ picnic at Heidelberg—­tell me about it!  Such of his peculiarities of temper as she did not understand, she guessed at and felt with her fine womanly instinct.  If at Ault she had been extremely simple in her dress, here she was almost exaggeratedly so.  She banished the “kohl” with which she had underlined her brilliant eyes, and strewed the violet powder to the four winds, as soon as she discovered that he preferred to stroke her full, firm cheeks when they were guiltless of powder.  She dropped her former freedom of speech, gave up the telling of highly-spiced anecdotes, and checked her roving glances and the frolicsome imps—­somewhat too deeply versed in Boccaccio—­ that haunted her lively brain, when she saw that he took umbrage at anything the least risky.  Her cigarettes horrified him, so she threw them out of the window, and never smoked again.  She even quelled the sensuality of her self-surrender, and veiled it with a show of shame-faced backwardness and the adorable ingenuousness of a schoolgirl on her honeymoon.  She strove to obliterate the remembrances of the heathenish abandonment of the first days, with their unrestrained impulses, testifying all too plainly to the fact that she was a woman well versed in all the arts of seduction.  At first this was dissimulation, the maneuvers of a shrewd, reader of character, but it soon came to be instinct and second nature; she deceived herself honestly, and returned, in her own mind, to the pristine virginity of her soul and body, finally coming to look upon herself as a simple-minded girl, ignorant of the world and of life, and conscious only of her boundless love for this one glorious man, and to whom the memories of a less harmless past seemed like wicked dreams sent by the Tempter to molest her chastity.  This