What a strange, slow, mocking look! So might
Aphrodite herself have looked back at some weary lover, remembering the
fire of his first embrace. Insatiate, smiling creature, slipping down to
the rim of the world to her bath in the sweet waters of dawn, whence
emerging, pure as a water lily, she would float in the cool sky till
evening came again! And just then she saw me looking, and hid behind a
holm-oak tree; but I could still see the gleam of one shoulder and her
long narrow eyes pursuing me. I went up to the tree and parted its dark
boughs to take her; but she had slipped behind another. I called to her
to stand, if only for one moment. But she smiled and went slip ping on,
and I ran thrusting through the wet bushes, leaping the fallen trunks.
The scent of rotting leaves disturbed by my feet leaped out into the
darkness, and birds, surprised, fluttered away. And still I ran--she
slipping ever further into the grove, and ever looking back at me. And I
thought: But I will catch you yet, you nymph of perdition! The wood will
soon be passed, you will have no cover then! And from her eyes, and the
scanty gleam of her flying limbs, I never looked away, not even when I
stumbled or ran against tree trunks in my blind haste. And at every
clearing I flew more furiously, thinking to seize all of her with my gaze
before she could cross the glade; but ever she found some little low
tree, some bush of birch ungrown, or the far top branches of the next
grove to screen her flying body and preserve allurement.
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