"Which you have been playing all your life! Oh, you are hard to
teach!"

Defiance reappeared on the face of the princess. She turned her back
on Mara, saying, "I know what you have been tormenting me for! You
have not succeeded, nor shall you succeed! You shall yet find me
stronger than you think! I will yet be mistress of myself! I am
still what I have always known myself--queen of Hell, and mistress
of the worlds!"

Then came the most fearful thing of all. I did not know what it
was; I knew myself unable to imagine it; I knew only that if it
came near me I should die of terror! I now know that it was LIFE
IN DEATH--life dead, yet existent; and I knew that Lilith had had
glimpses, but only glimpses of it before: it had never been with
her until now.

She stood as she had turned. Mara went and sat down by the fire.
Fearing to stand alone with the princess, I went also and sat again
by the hearth. Something began to depart from me. A sense of cold,
yet not what we call cold, crept, not into, but out of my being,
and pervaded it. The lamp of life and the eternal fire seemed dying
together, and I about to be left with naught but the consciousness
that I had been alive. Mercifully, bereavement did not go so far,
and my thought went back to Lilith.

Something was taking place in her which we did not know. We knew
we did not feel what she felt, but we knew we felt something of the
misery it caused her. The thing itself was in her, not in us; its
reflex, her misery, reached us, and was again reflected in us: she