Explore "Our Lady of Darkness" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In front of the fire a girl lay on the floor asleep. She had placed herself on her side, facing the glow and cuddled into it; but in the relaxation of profound slumber her head had fallen back, so that the light from a lamp on the wall illuminated her features. These looked curiously, pathetically child-like under the seal of a rest so deep that her bosom hardly rose and fell to accent it. Her lips were a little parted; her cheeks a little hollow, and quite colourless. From every ruffle of her hair -- fine and pale golden as a rabbit's fur -- that lay spilt about her head, to the toe-tips of her white bare feet (that nestled into one another despite some inflammatory wounds that scarred them as cruelly as if they had been bastinadoed), she was so almost motionless as to seem like a figure in tinted porcelain -- King Cophetua's beggar-maid, it might have been; for, indeed, her clothes were very stained and ragged.
The door opened, and a woman came swiftly to her side and gazed down upon her -- a woman, under the fierce glow and lust of whose beauty she seemed to shrink into the mere semblance of a doll thrown down by a passionate child.