But his heart I would encase with the scales
of a monster, then fill with pride, with beastliness of desire,
with recklessness, with hypocrisy, with death. Then I would have
him touched with some rod of disenchantment until his two eyes would
become the cold orbs of the adder; and on his lip would come the foam
of raging intoxication; and to his feet the spring of the panther;
and his soft hand should become the clammy hand of a wasted
skeleton; while suddenly from his heart would burst in crackling and
all-devouring fury the unquenchable flames; and in the affected lisp
of his tongue would come the hiss of the worm that never dies.
But, until disenchanted, nothing but myrrh, and balm, and ringlet, and
diamond, and flute-like voice, and conversation aromatic, facile, and
Frenchy.
There are practices in respectable circles, I am told by physicians,
which need public reprehension. Herod's massacre of the innocents was
as nothing compared with that of millions and millions by what I shall
call _ante-natal_ murders.
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