The Fox-Woman

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE VAMPIRE AS to the Fox-Woman, that was a less difficult, and, as I have said, not quite so joyous a performance. Yet he liked to paint her because in secret he adored color, and he might put color into the face of the Fox-Woman and in her eyes and hair. The color he liked best for her eyes was the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE VAMPIRE AS to the Fox-Woman, that was a less difficult, and, as I have said, not quite so joyous a performance. Yet he liked to paint her because in secret he adored color, and he might put color into the face of the Fox-Woman and in her eyes and hair. The color he liked best for her eyes was the marvellous purple of a certain one of his morning- glories with the dew on it; it was his best beloved. For her lips, the scarlet of a poppy he had once found at the monastery on the mountain; as for her hair, that was the color of brass; and he made her brows to beetle ?a little?and her nose to tilt?a little? as he had been taught the brows and noses of the west-ocean people did. But he could not make her other than beautiful, for he had never learned to paint ugliness and never ugliness the same as pain, to him. And he made her very beautiful?very For the rest, he had only to remember that the Fox- Woman had no soul, that she smiled always, and that she must be splendid, ?but, nevertheless, as brass and stone are splendid perhaps. And her face must speak just what the other must not?not that within, for it was unspeakable. For this was the first of her bewitchments. After this was her voice, which he somehow made you hear; then her touch, which he somehow made you feel; then, at the last, her smile. With these she won and took and devoured men's souls? who had none of her own. So enchanting, so alluring, had the gods designed this arch temptress, that to stop and look upon her face was soul-death. For then one listened ?waited?for her voice, like the far-away temple bells; and halted for her touch, like vapors of the poppy; and watched for her smile, like the morning sun over the sea; and after that it mattered not, ?for one's soul was gone. And one scarce remembered, ..