They were as dark as ever eyes of woman, but our
older poets delighted in eyes as gray as glass: certainly not in
their darkness lay their peculiar witchery. They were grandly
proportioned, neither almond-shaped nor round, neither prominent
nor deep-set; but even shape by itself is not much. If I go on to
say they were luminous, plainly there the danger begins. Sepia's
eyes, I confess, were not lords of the deepest light--for she was
not true; but neither was theirs a surface light, generated of
merely physical causes: through them, concentrating her will upon
their utterance, she could establish a psychical contact with
_almost_ any man she chose. Their power was an evil, selfish
shadow of original, universal love. By them she could produce at
once, in the man on whom she turned their play, a sense as it
were of some primordial, fatal affinity between her and him--of
an aboriginal understanding, the rare possession of but a few of
the pairs made male and female. Into those eyes she would call up
her soul, and there make it sit, flashing light, in gleams and
sparkles, shoots and coruscations--not from great, black pupils
alone--to whose size there were who said the suicidal belladonna
lent its aid--but from great, dark irids as well--nay, from
eyeballs, eyelashes, and eyelids, as from spiritual catapult or
culverin, would she dart the lightnings of her present soul,
invading with influence as irresistible as subtile the soul of
the man she chose to assail, who, thenceforward, for a season, if
he were such as she took him for, scarce had choice but be her
slave.
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