poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflect on its charms in the
society of Marko. He was very young, he was little more than an
adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string or
slacken him. One could play on him securely, thinking of a distant day
--and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude--when he might be made
happy.

Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to
anatomize him beset her. The ground of it was, that she found him in her
likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling,
now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the
pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic
home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked self-
knowledge, and of her saying: 'That is like me: that is very like me:
that is terribly like': up to the point where the comparison wooed her no
longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped her so shrewdly as
to force her to say: 'That is he, not I': and the vivisected youth
received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at a touch. It was
given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him. Anatomy is the title
for the operation, because the probing of herself in another, with the
liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her, allowed her while unhurt
to feel that she prosecuted her researches in a dead body. The moment
her strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank under a stroke of pain,
she abstained from carving, and simultaneously conscious that he lived,
she was kind to him.

'This love of yours, Marko--is it so deep?'

'I love you.'