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felt.
Gwynplaine was the religion of Dea. Sometimes, lost in her sense of love
towards him, she knelt, like a beautiful priestess before a gnome in a
pagoda, made happy by her adoration.
Imagine to yourself an abyss, and in its centre an oasis of light, and
in this oasis two creatures shut out of life, dazzling each other. No
purity could be compared to their loves. Dea was ignorant what a kiss
might be, though perhaps she desired it; because blindness, especially
in a woman, has its dreams, and though trembling at the approaches of
the unknown, does not fear them all. As to Gwynplaine, his sensitive
youth made him pensive. The more delirious he felt, the more timid he
became. He might have dared anything with this companion of his early
youth, with this creature as innocent of fault as of the light, with
this blind girl who saw but one thing--that she adored him! But he would
have thought it a theft to take what she might have given; so he
resigned himself with a melancholy satisfaction to love angelically, and
the conviction of his deformity resolved itself into a proud purity.
These happy creatures dwelt in the ideal. They were spouses in it at
distances as opposite as the spheres. They exchanged in its firmament
the deep effluvium which is in infinity attraction, and on earth the
sexes. Their kisses were the kisses of souls.
They had always lived a common life. They knew themselves only in each
other's society. The infancy of Dea had coincided with the youth of
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