Chapter VIII

... Time fugued. Being no longer under the obligation of visiting Dora since the shindy he had made in her home, Ulick became truly intimate with Mona. They lived like sensible married people. They walked in the park. They went to the theatre, to concerts and the opera. They met every afternoon. At least three times a week Mona took luncheon at the Maison Felicé. She was not noticed there any more than the other ladies who came with their lovers. She would then go afterward to Ulick's rooms where he played Chopin for her, read to her, made love to her; passionate love. She had revised that first hasty judgment and now found the life sensual an entrancing experience. She had confessed to him her disappointments, and for answer he read aloud Stendhal's Lamiel that extraordinary unfinished fiction, with Lamiel's similar adventure. "Is that all?" asks this disconcerting heroine, after she had bribed with silver a stout peasant lad to induct her into the mystery of sex. This episode revolted Mona, who saw in love, but one object--children. Ulick realized now it was maternity suppressed that had sent her to him knocking at his closed door. Love with her was not only a sensation, but also a sentiment. She was not a sentimental girl. She loved Ulick, but she loved children more. "The sacred wound of maternity" was a phrase that appealed to her; it was thus she had heard called the semi-mysterious function of the lunar sex; that sex upon which the moon had impressed its rhythms. Mona, under the skin, was a matter-of-fact woman for whom Mother Nature could do no wrong. She loved children, and in default of them she delighted in the poetic fiction of dream-children. Ulick had only to pronounce the names of Grane and Shamus to see her face swept as if by joyful news. Temperamentally she was elected to happy motherhood. This idea caused him much disquietude.

* * * * *

With intense interest he read of Easter's début at Munich. She had sung Isolde with immense success. The cables were choked with stories of her brilliant singing, dramatic acting. The three Brunnhildes followed, and a few weeks later a royal command came from Baireuth; Queen Cosima graciously permitted the American girl to be a "guest" for a week. Again--Isolde, Brunnhilde, and most startling of all--Kundry. She would be the first American to sing in Parsifal at Baireuth. After that, offers from Paris, Berlin, London, and no doubt, from New York. But the Metropolitan House management was impenetrable. Easter had changed her name to Istar.... Istar the daughter of sin! chuckled Alfred Stone....

THE SIXTH GATE

_At the sixth gate, the warden stripped her; he took the rings from her feet, the rings from her hands_....