They were dead, dead, dead, so close and clinging!
Go further! Go further! At last she opened the bottom drawer of
all, and her eye fell askance upon a feather boa, curled up at the
bottom--soft, smooth, and long; a winding, coiling, serpentine
boa. In a second, she had fallen upon it bodily with greedy hands,
and was twisting it round her waist, and holding it high and low,
and fighting fiercely at times, and figuring with it like a posturant.
Some dormant impulse of her race seemed to stir in her blood, with
frantic leaps and bounds, at its first conscious awakening. She
gave herself up to it wildly now. She was mad. She was mad. She
was glad. She was happy.
Then she began to turn round again, slowly, slowly, slowly. As she
turned, she raised the boa now high above her head; now held it
low on one side, now stooped down and caressed it. At times, as she
played with it, the lifeless thing seemed to glide from her grasp
in curling folds and elude her; at others, she caught it round the
neck like a snake, and twisted it about her arm, or let it twine
and encircle her writhing body. Like a snake! like a snake! That
idea ran like wildfire through her burning veins. It was a snake,
indeed, she wanted; a real live snake; what would she not have
given, if it were only Sardanapalus!
Sardanapalus, so glossy, so beautiful, so supple, that glorious green
serpent, with his large smooth coils, and his silvery scales, and
his darting red tongue, and his long lithe movements.
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