Glory and the Lightning Read Free Page B

countenances bland and unwrinkled and undistorted. Contempt banishes pity. Once you pity a man, you will love him, and that is a detestable and alarming and dangerous condition, and leads ultimately to despair. Certainly, you must assume an attitude of discreet devotion, for men desire all women to be devoted to them. But never must you be truly devoted. It is suicide.”
    Love, in short, must be for one’s self, and never must it be wasted on a man. “Let the poets sing of love,” said Thargelia. “But that love is not for their wives; it is only for women who contain their sentiments and are elusive as well as daintily wanton, and are never fully possessed. Had Artemis fallen in love with Acteon, and had married him, he would soon have become wearied of her love and sought a more fugitive joy. Men demand a woman’s whole heart. Pretend to give it, and then when he feels secure in its possession give him cause to feel alarm, not overtly, but with a smile, an averted head, a gentle disentanglement from his arms. He will then begin the pursuit once more, and sue for your affections with gold and jewels.”
    “We must, then, live only for ourselves,” said Aspasia with the most demure of countenances.
    “Who else is there but ourselves?” Thargelia asked. “Once I listened to the dissertations of a famous philosopher who was dexterous and wise enough to convince anyone that all is delusion, that we are all dreams except to the dreamer, that none exists but one’s self. How can we prove the existence of any other? How can we be certain that we are not entirely alone in a dream?”
    The school engaged expert men and women who employed all the arts and perversions of love before the fascinated students. “There is more to such joys than mere copulation, which we share with the beasts,” Thargelia would admonish, “and has for its purpose gross reproduction. It is a hasty affair, such, and without delicacy or enhancement. While you must restrain your own selves from the utter pleasure, you must learn to give pleasure to the utmost, and if engaged in that pleasure yourselves you cannot be expert with a man, nor make him delirious with exotic sensations. Be voluptuous but never vulgar. Be abandoned daintily, but never with complete abandonment. A veil is more alluring than a naked body. Subtlety is more to be desired than shamelessness. A woman never must give all, not even in pretense, except for a moment or two.”
    She trained the maidens never to express disgust or aversion, or even to feel either. “However,” she would say, “if you cannot control such revulsions completely invent epigrams or a poem while engaging in love with a man, or think of a lovelier way to dress your hair, or your money. So long as you are clever and proficient, and remember your lessons, the man will never guess your true feelings. Again, a woman must never fully surrender herself at any time. She must never listen to pleas, but only smile beckoningly, and promise.”
    As she sat with her maidens this sunset she rejoiced in their beauty, and especially in Aspasia’s, for the promise of the maid’s childhood had not been false but in truth it had not fully prophesied. Aspasia was taller than the other girls, which had first made Thargelia apprehensive, and then she remembered the greeting recorded by Homer: “Daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair!” Aspasia was certainly divinely fair, and Thargelia could not recall any of her earlier maidens who could compare with her, nor even her present companions. Amidst all that loveliness of black and brown and russet and fair locks, of brilliant eyes and rosy cheeks and white throats and young creamy bosoms, of dimples and curved red lips and alabaster chins and springlike bodies, Aspasia was a girlish Aphrodite among mere mortals. They diminished, for all their loveliness, in her presence, as bronze dims before gold, and they became, despite their choice and unusual grace