In some way, she was not afraid of him at all.  In some other way she used him as a mere magic implement, used him with the most amazing priestess-craft.  Himself, the individual man which he was, this she treated with an indifference that was startling to him.

He forgot, perhaps, that this was how he had treated her.  His famous desire for her, what had it been but this same attempt to strike a magic fire out of her, for his own ecstasy.  They were playing the same game of fire.  In him, however, there was all the time something hard and reckless and defiant, which stood apart.  She was absolutely gone in her own incantations.  She was absolutely gone, like a priestess utterly involved in her terrible rites.  And he was part of the ritual only, God and victim in one.  God and victim!  All the time, God and victim.  When his aloof soul realised, amid the welter of incantation, how he was being used,—­not as himself but as something quite different —­God and victim—­then he dilated with intense surprise, and his remote soul stood up tall and knew itself alone.  He didn’t want it, not at all.  He knew he was apart.  And he looked back over the whole mystery of their love-contact.  Only his soul was apart.

He was aware of the strength and beauty and godlikeness that his breast was then to her—­the magic.  But himself, he stood far off, like Moses’ sister Miriam.  She would drink the one drop of his innermost heart’s blood, and he would be carrion.  As Cleopatra killed her lovers in the morning.  Surely they knew that death was their just climax.  They had approached the climax.  Accept then.

But his soul stood apart, and could have nothing to do with it.  If he had really been tempted, he would have gone on, and she might have had his central heart’s blood.  Yes, and thrown away the carrion.  He would have been willing.

But fatally, he was not tempted.  His soul stood apart and decided.  At the bottom of his soul he disliked her.  Or if not her, then her whole motive.  Her whole life-mode.  He was neither God nor victim:  neither greater nor less than himself.  His soul, in its isolation as she lay on his breast, chose it so, with the soul’s inevitability.  So, there was no temptation.

When it was sufficiently light, he kissed her and left her.  Quietly he left the silent flat.  He had some difficulty in unfastening the various locks and bars and catches of the massive door downstairs, and began, in irritation and anger, to feel he was a prisoner, that he was locked in.  But suddenly the ponderous door came loose, and he was out in the street.  The door shut heavily behind him, with a shudder.  He was out in the morning streets of Florence.

CHAPTER XX

THE BROKEN ROD

The day was rainy.  Aaron stayed indoors alone, and copied music and slept.  He felt the same stunned, withered feeling as before, but less intensely, less disastrously, this time.  He knew now, without argument or thought that he would never go again to the Marchesa:  not as a lover.  He would go away from it all.  He did not dislike her.  But he would never see her again.  A great gulf had opened, leaving him alone on the far side.