"Shall I sign the contract?" I asked.
"Not yet," said Wanda. "I shall first add your conditions, and the actual signing won't occur until the proper time and place."
"In Constantinople?"
"No. I have thought things over. What special value would there be in owning a slave where everyone owns slaves. What I want is to have a slave, I alone, here in our civilized sober, Philistine world, and a slave who submits helplessly to my power solely on account of my beauty and personality, not because of law, of property rights, or compulsions. This attracts me. But at any rate we will go to a country where we are not known and where you can appear before the world as my servant without embarrassment. Perhaps to Italy, to Rome or Naples."
* * * * *
We were sitting on Wanda's ottoman. She wore her ermine jacket, her hair was loose and fell like a lion's mane down her back. She clung to my lips, drawing my soul from my body. My head whirled, my blood began to seethe, my heart beat violently against hers.
"I want to be absolutely in your power, Wanda," I exclaimed suddenly, seized by that frenzy of passion when I can scarcely think clearly or decide freely. "I want to put myself absolutely at your mercy for good or evil without any condition, without any limit to your power."
While saying this I had slipped from the ottoman, and lay at her feet looking up at her with drunken eyes.
"How beautiful you now are," she exclaimed, "your eyes half-broken in ecstasy fill me with joy, carry me away. How wonderful your look would be if you were being beaten to death, in the extreme agony. You have the eye of a martyr."
* * * * *
Sometimes, nevertheless, I have an uneasy feeling about placing myself so absolutely, so unconditionally into a woman's hands. Suppose she did abuse my passion, her power?
Well, then I would experience what has occupied my imagination since my childhood, what has always given me the feeling of seductive terror. A foolish apprehension! It will be a wanton game she will play with me, nothing more. She loves me, and she is good, a noble personality, incapable of a breach of faith. But it lies in her hands --if she wants to she can. What a temptation in this doubt, this fear!
Now I understand Manon l'Escault and the poor chevalier, who, even in the pillory, while she was another man's mistress, still adored her.
Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers everything, because it must. It is not our judgment that leads us; it is neither the advantages nor the faults which we discover, that make us abandon ourselves, or that repel us.