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"I understand," Wanda interrupted "It gives a do quality to a woman"

"Not only that," I continued "You know I aination, and thence it receives its nourishhly sensitive, when at about the age of ten the legends of thewith a kind of horror, which really was rapture, of how they pined in prisons, were laid on the gridiron, pierced with arrows, boiled in pitch, thrown to wild animals, nailed to the cross, and suffered the most horrible torment with a kind of joy To suffer and endure cruel torture froht, especially when it was inflicted by a beautiful wo demonic was for me concentrated in woman I literally carried the idea into a sort of cult

"I felt there was so In wo divine, because the most important function of existence--the continuation of the species--is her vocation To me woman represented a personification of nature, Isis, and man was her priest, her slave In contrast to him she was cruel like nature herself who tosses aside whatever has served her purposes as soon as she no longer has need for it To him her cruelties, even death itself, still were sensual raptures

"I envied King Gunther whoht, and the poor troubadour whom his capricious mistress had sewed in the skins of wolves to have hi Aue, and carried to her castle Divin, where, after having amused herself a while with hi," cried Wanda "I alht fall into the hands of a woe race In the wolf's skin, under the teeth of the dogs, or upon the wheel, you would lose the taste for your kind of poetry"

"Do you think so? I hardly do"

"Have you actually lost your senses"

"Possibly But letstories in which the extremist cruelties were described I loved especially to look at pictures and prints which represented theuinary tyrants that ever occupied a throne; the inquisitors who had the heretics tortured, roasted, and butchered; all the woes of history have recorded as lustful, beautiful, and violent woary, Queen Margot, Isabeau, the Sultana Roxolane, the Russian Czarinas of last century--all these I saw in furs or in robes bordered with ermine"