a living symbol of unproven curiosities. In old maidenhood
she acheives aparalysis of the instincts, with the result,
to put it simply, that should Eros approach her "she would-
n't know what to do".

There was something in the arsenical Piero that
wanted a mother; something in Eliza that wanted a lover --
a lover who would open the flood-gates of her fantasy,
and leave her body where it belonged --rigid under the ashes
of her accustomed complexes. Inhibitions

Piero played to her his mincing music, and tended
this platonic conquest with playful quirks and humouring
caresses.

They became inseperable.

She warmed the blast of emptiness that swept
her Pallazzo to a home atmosphere, where she fed Piero
with zeal and performed the ceremony of darning his socks.

Eliza, in the Venetian moonlight romanced to
him of the purely spiritual obligations of love, which he
accepted graciously as ahitherto unsuspected form of abstract
vice.

Gradually they gathered round them a scattering of
expatriated bachelors, deeply attached to their furniture ;
who always delighted to show Eliza a new solitaire, while
Piero composed.

Piero was the youngest among the bach-
elors, and his accheivement of a transcendental family life
lent him a certain augustness among them.

And while through them he acquired a modified aspect of
self advertisement: for they taught him that he who treads

tactfully, may keep one foot in wonderland society and
one in wonderland.

Eliza abetted this innovation of compromise with her middle-class maxims, So Piero washed his face and wore tweeds which she chose for him.

Theirs was now a delightful life, Piero placed
"Beauty" precisely in the Pallazzo and together they collected
it's antique forms, and together they would stand off and
admire them in those nooks to which they had been
appointed-- and always Piero found everything "too" exquisite"

Eliza was not neglected, Piero and an intimate
artist designed costumes for her; they would stand her in the
center of the music room, and trip around her entranced
with draping striped crepe and monkey fur upon her; the
attendant dressmaker bowed her head and said "sicuro", while
Piero's manicured fingers depicted perfection.

There she stood, like a mummy resuscitated
with a fictitious breath of flattery. The fearful tension of
her eyes was bordered with very black fringes, and over
the quivvering tendons of her insteps was stretched expensive
silken hose. And Piero twisted her around and about ---
--like some marionnette; while the dressmaker nodded again
"sicuro".

Eliza took her headaches to lie for a nap of an
afternoon, to stare through the pastel surface of the wall
and the dim colour of the flower of love in the mist of the
tapestry.

Through all her patty and inspiring traffic with them, Piero and the bachelors XXXXXXX impressed Eliza as the incognito guardians of some holy bread. When they spoke they swallowed preparedly as if to read speech of something incommunicably sweet and secret, which their mouths must never surrender.

Eliza's question of their bachelor's significance
---
her Curiosity materialized to an almost palpable entity
passing from Eliza to move among them, stroking their conscious-
ness beseechingly....................they condescended to answer
with conundrums of discretion.

Eliza had been reared by a great aunt who,
steeped in melancholia, warned her of hell, and lauded
the unconditional surrender of being "sincere."

From this rudimentary religious influence she had graduated
to spiritualism and the popular occult

She cultivated her aura like a garden of unscented
flowers.

But Eliza by dint of horoscopes and sceances is was
reaching a higher plane--some plane on which psychic
phenomena <u>themselves</u> achieved orgasms so tantalisingly suggest
themselves.

Her body became hollow---f---she could feel the wind
of the spirit blowing about in it, stemming her blood and
urging her skin.

There are crises in the life of the chaste woman, when
the fetishes of savage ancestry and the Christian devil,
together with all the weird personifications into which the
unappropriated sex force transforms itself, fall upon her
taut nerves to rend them in the stillness of the night.