He thought of that torrential discord rising
around her belled purple skirt, the cool yellow of her waist crossed
with fragile lace, beating past her lifted slender hand, the nails
stained with vermilion, to the pointed oval of her face against the
black hair and streaming gold of the headdress. Nothing, it appeared,
could be farther apart than the muffled furious strains escaping in
bursts through the opened windows beyond and the still apparition from
the tranquility of his Eastlake house. He would have said,
unhesitatingly, that the formal melody of the eighteenth century, of
Scarlatti and harpsichords, was the music that best accompanied
Cytherea. But she dominated, haunted with her grace, the infernal
dinning sound of unspeakable defilements. Savina was racked beyond
endurance:
"I can't stand it any longer," she told Lee hysterically, risen with
her palms pressed to her ears. "I can hear it with every nerve. It will
never go out of my brain. You must stop it. Can't you understand that
it is driving me mad!" Her voice grew so shrill, she trembled so
violently, that he had to hold her forcibly in his arms. When, toward
dawn, it ceased, Savina was exhausted; she lay limp and white on her
bed; and, across the room, he could hear the shallowness of her
irregular breathing. As a grey light diluted the darkness, the trade
wind, the night wind, dropped, and the heat palpably increased.
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