The Future Eve by Villiers de L’isle-adam

Author:Villiers de L’isle-adam [L’isle-adam, Villiers de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIII

BORN OF SCIENCE

“HERE,” said Professor X, “we have most of the charms of Miss Evelyn Habal. If you found them natural in the first aspect, Lord Ewald, you will have to correct your impression. She was only counterfeit.”

Hadaly raised a lighted wand above her head and stood close to the somber drawer—like a statue beside a sepulchre—while the professor called out like an auctioneer:

“First of all, we have the wonderful hair of Herodias, gleaming like the rays of the sun in the autumn foliage; the souvenir of Eve, golden hair, eternally glorious!”

He shook out a horrible switch of discolored hair, in which one could see that the gray hairs had been dyed.

“Here is the lily complexion, the blush of innocent modesty, the color of the tempting lips!”

He pulled out boxes of cosmetics, creams, powders, and beauty patches. .

“Here is the calm splendor of the magnificent eyes, the arc for the eyebrows, the shadow and the languor of passion, tie pretty veins of the temples, the pink of the nostrils, which dilate with joy as she listens to the footsteps of her beloved.”

He threw out the curling tongs, blackened with smoke; the blue pencil, the rouge.

“Here are the dazzling teeth, so pretty and white, which in the magic of a smile provokes the first kiss.”

He touched the spring of a set of false teeth, malting them click together.

“Here is the beauty of the velvety throat, the clinging arms, the alabaster shoulders.

He lifted up, one after another, the instruments for-enameling.

The scientist threw all the things back into the drawer pell mell, and letting the lid fall as he would on a coffin, he pushed it back into the wall.

“I think, my dear fellow, that you are more enlightened now,” he said. “Of course, I don’t mean that all women are like that, but most of those who bring men to a desperate end are, more or less. But what I want to say is, that in the end all will resemble that specter on the screen.”

Lord Ewald was silent and saddened. He looked at Hadaly thoughtfully.

“Yes,” said the professor, “one could kneel before a tomb, but it would be very difficult to bow before the- contents of that drawer, would it not?”

He pulled the cord, the specter disappeared, the funeral oration was ended.

“It is really not worth while,” he continued, “to break one’s home ties and to spring headlong into suicide. All for the contents of that drawer. Bah!

“With proof that my poor friend had been held by such chimeras as these, I said to myself: ‘ This is nothing but an artificial living illusion. In Europe and America every year there are thousands of reasonable men who forsake splendid wives and allow themselves to be destroyed by an absurd illusion—’”

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