plicity, the weakness, the sensual and egotistical desires,
the power and vanity and vain-longing, of
men.

Meta Beggs was the mask, smooth and sterile, of
the hunger for adornment, for gold bands and jewels
and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of
silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained
with antimony in the clay courts of Sumeria; the
Paphian with painted feet loitering on the roofs of
Memphis while the blocks of red sandstone floated
sluggishly down the Nile for the pyramid of Khufu
the King; she was the flushed voluptuousness relaxed
in the scented spray of pagan baths; the
woman with piled and white-powdered hair in a
gold shift of Louis XIV; the prostitute with a
pinched waist and great flowered sleeves of the
Maison Doree. She was as old as the first vice, as the
first lust budding like a black blossom in the morbidity
of men successful, satiated.

She was old, but Lettice was older.

Lettice was more ancient than men walking cunning
and erect, than the lithe life of sun-heated
tangles, than the vital principle of flowering plants
fertilized by the unerring chance of vagrant insects
and airs.

Standing in the flooding blue flame of day they
opposed to each other the forces fatally locked in the
body of humanity. Lettice, with her unborn child,

[[258]]

p257 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p258w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p259

v?