Venus in Furs - Page 17/107

While she was speaking her eyes sparkled roguishly, and I had taken hold of her hands without exactly knowing what to do with them, but being a genuine dilettante I hastily let go of them again.

"Your frankness," I said, "delights me, and not it alone--"

My confounded dilettantism again throttled me as though there were a rope around my neck.

"You were about to say--"

"I was about to say--I was--I am sorry--I interrupted you."

"How, so?"

A long pause. She is doubtless engaging in a monologue, which translated into my language would be comprised in the single word, "donkey."

"If I may ask," I finally began, "how did you arrive at these--these conclusions?"

"Quite simply, my father was an intelligent man. From my cradle onward I was surrounded by replicas of ancient art; at ten years of age I read Gil Blas, at twelve La Pucelle. Where others had Hop-o'-my-thumb, Bluebeard, Cinderella, as childhood friends, mine were Venus and Apollo, Hercules and Lackoon. My husband's personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: 'Well, have you already picked out a lover?' I blushed with shame. 'Don't deceive me,' he added on one occasion, 'that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys.'

"I suppose, I hardly need tell you that during his life time I had no lover; but it was through him that I have become what I am, a woman of Greece."

"A goddess," I interrupted.

"Which one," she smiled.

"Venus."

She threatened me with her finger and knitted her brows. "Perhaps, even a 'Venus in Furs.' Watch out, I have a large, very large fur, with which I could cover you up entirely, and I have a mind to catch you in it as in a net."

"Do you believe," I said quickly, for an idea which seemed good, in spite of its conventionality and triteness, flashed into my head, "do you believe that your theories could be carried into execution at the present time, that Venus would be permitted to stray with impunity among our railroads and telegraphs in all her undraped beauty and serenity?"