“And. . . I don’t know. . . these days I have grown

fond of red.”

“Helen is dead,” repeated “the Indian so celebrated by Theophrastus” through his sleep. “What remains of her for me? The memory of her grace, her light, delicate, and perfumed memory, her floating and delicious living image, almost more delicious than her living form itself. For I am sure she will never leave me, and it is only the desire for an unattainable eternity that obsesses and spoils the ephemeral joys of lovers. Her memory will be a featherweight trophy that I shall always carry with me, a precious phantom whose undulating and fluid form, like a voluptuous hydra, bathes my head and my groin with the caress of its tentacles. Indian, so celebrated by Theophrastus, thou shalt always carry with thee her slightly bloodied memory, so perfumed and light and floating; thou shalt carry, like a scalp-hunting Indian. . . her hair!”

And from the depths of the being of this man, who was so abnormal that he could only warm his heart on the ice of a corpse, arose the admission of this certainty, torn from him by force:

“I adore her.”

The Love Machine

THE LOVE MACHINE

When Marcueil said: “I adore her,” Ellen was no longer at his side.

Ellen was not dead.

Only fainted, in a swoon; women never die from this sort of adventure.

Her father greeted the return of his ill, drunk, happy, and cynical daughter with stupefaction, and Bathybius, summoned in haste, in spite of the woman’s mask and without regard for professional secrecy or even professional prejudice – Bathybius added his confirmation:

“I saw it – as truly as though I had held it under a microscope or a speculum – I saw it face to face: the Impossible!”

But when the doxies were freed they spoke out, and their jealousy claimed its revenge.

Virginie called on Elson – beautiful, miraculously made up, with her pure forehead and her candid eyes, looking like Truth incarnate – and declared:

“The doctor is an old fool. We were there all the time. Nothing extraordinary happened. By the second day they still hadn’t done anything, and when we were watching them they did it three times just to impress us, and then the woman wouldn’t go on.”

All that could be gotten out of Ellen was:

“I love him.”

“Does he love you?” asked her father.

However much the Supermale had dishonored him, the American had but one outcome in view: André Marcueil must marry his daughter.

“I love him,” was Ellen’s reply to every question.

“Then he doesn’t love you?” asked Elson.

This presumption largely determined the tragic course of the events that were to follow.

Bathybius was completely unnerved by what he had observed, and was instrumental in suggesting to William Elson the idea that: “He’s not a man, he’s a machine.”

He added the old phrase he was always wont to repeat when speaking of Marcueil: