The dance
is over, she will fall back on herself. It is perfect, too perfect.
During the next dance, while she is in the power of the educated Ettore,
a perfect and calculated voluptuary, who knows how much he can get out
of this Northern woman, and only how much, the wood-cutter stands on the
edge of the darkness, in the open doorway, and watches. He is fixed upon
her, established, perfect. And all the while she is aware of the
insistent hawk-like poising of the face of the wood-cutter, poised on
the edge of the darkness, in the doorway, in possession,
unrelinquishing.
And she is angry. There is something stupid, absurd, in the hard,
talon-like eyes watching so fiercely and so confidently in the doorway,
sure, unmitigated. Has the creature no sense?
The woman reacts from him. For some time she will take no notice of him.
But he waits, fixed. Then she comes near to him, and his will seems to
take hold of her. He looks at her with a strange, proud, inhuman
confidence, as if his influence with her was already accomplished.
'_Venga--venga un po'_,' he says, jerking his head strangely to the
darkness.
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