with the same face, lips.' Her finger touched her own lip. Something seemed to shift suddenly, something within the very walls of the room itself, and the mirrors trembled with her image as if the earth had sighed beneath the foundations. Carriages rumbled in the streets; but they were too far away. And then I saw what her still childish figure was doing: in one hand she held the doll, the other to her lips; and the hand that held the doll was crushing it, crushing it and popping it so it bobbed and broke in a heap of glass that fell now from her open, bloody hand onto the carpet. She wrung the tiny dress to make a shower of littering particles as I averted my eyes, only to see her in the tilted mirror over the fire, see her eyes scanning me from my feet to the top of my head. She moved through that mirror towards me and drew close on the bed.
"'Why do you look away, why don't you look at me?' she asked, her voice very smooth, very like a silver bell. But then she laughed softly, a woman's laugh, and said,'Did you think I'd be your daughter forever? Are you the father of fools, the fool of fathers?'
"'Your tone is unkind with me,' I answered.
"'Hmmm... unkind.' I think she nodded. She was a blaze in the corner of my eye, blue flames, golden flames.
"'And what do they think of you,' I asked as gently as I could,'out there?' I gestured to the open window.
"'Many things.' She smiled.'Many things. Men are marvelous at explanations: Have you see the "little people" in the parks, the circuses, the freaks that men pay money to laugh at?'
"'I was a sorcerer's apprentice only!' I burst out suddenly, despite myself.'Apprentice!' I said. I wanted to touch her, to stroke her hair, but I sat there afraid of her, her anger like a match about to kindle.
"Again she smiled, and then she drew my hand into her lap and covered it as best she could with her own.'Apprentice, yes,' she laughed.'But tell me one thing, one thing from that lofty height. What was it like... making love?'
"I was walking away from her before I meant to, I was searching like a dim-wilted mortal man for cape and gloves.'You don't remember?' she asked with perfect calm, as I put my hand on the brass door handle.
"I stopped, feeling her eyes on my back, ashamed, and then I turned around and made as if to think, Where am I going, what shall I do, why do I stand here?
"'It was something hurried,' I said, trying now to meet her eyes. How perfectly, coldly blue they were. How earnest.'And... it was seldom savored... something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.'
"'Ahhh... ' she said.'Like hurting you as I do now... that is also the pale shadow of killing.'
" 'Yes, madam,' I said to her.'I am inclined to believe that is correct.' And bowing swiftly, I bade her good-night."
"It was a long time after I'd left her that I slowed my pace. I'd crossed the Seine. I wanted darkness. To hide from her and the feelings that welled up in me, and the great consuming fear that I was utterly inadequate to make her happy, or to make myself happy by pleasing her.
"I would have given the world to please her; the world we now possessed, which seemed at once empty and eternal. Yet I was injured by her words and by her eyes, and no amount of explanations to her which passed through and through my mind now, even forming on my lips in desperate whispers as I left the Rue St. Michel and went deeper and deeper into the older, darker streets of the Latin Quarter-no amount of explanations seemed to soothe what I imagined to be her grave dissatisfaction, or my own pain.
"Finally I left off words except for a strange chant.
I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under the indifferent stars like a seam.'I cannot make her happy, I do not make her happy; and her unhappiness increases every day.' This was my chant, which I repeated like a rosary, a charm to change the facts, her inevitable disillusionment with our quest, which