Lilith

"I know not how," she replied−−with the look of one who foresaw and feared the answer.
"Open thy hand, and let that which is in it go."
A fierce refusal seemed to struggle for passage, but she kept it prisoned.
"I cannot," she said. "I have no longer the power. Open it for me."
She held out the offending hand. It was more a paw than a hand. It seemed to me plain that she could not
open it.
Mara did not even look at it.
"You must open it yourself," she said quietly.
"I have told you I cannot!"
Lilith
"You can if you will−−not indeed at once, but by persistent effort. What you have done, you do not yet wish
undone−−do not yet intend to undo!"
"You think so, I dare say," rejoined the princess with a flash of insolence, "but I KNOW that I cannot open
my hand!"
"I know you better than you know yourself, and I know you can. You have often opened it a little way.
Without trouble and pain you cannot open it quite, but you CAN open it. At worst you could beat it open! I
pray you, gather your strength, and open it wide."
"I will not try what I know impossible. It would be the part of a fool!"
"Which you have been playing all your life! Oh, you are hard to teach!"
Defiance reappeared on the face of the princess. She turned her back on Mara, saying, "I know what you have
been tormenting me for! You have not succeeded, nor shall you succeed! You shall yet find me stronger than
you think! I will yet be mistress of myself! I am still what I have always known myself−−queen of Hell, and
mistress of the worlds!"
Then came the most fearful thing of all. I did not know what it was; I knew myself unable to imagine it; I
knew only that if it came near me I should die of terror! I now know that it was LIFE IN DEATH−−life dead,
yet existent; and I knew that Lilith had had glimpses, but only glimpses of it before: it had never been with
her until now.
She stood as she had turned. Mara went and sat down by the fire. Fearing to stand alone with the princess, I
went also and sat again by the hearth. Something began to depart from me. A sense of cold, yet not what we
call cold, crept, not into, but out of my being, and pervaded it. The lamp of life and the eternal fire seemed
dying together, and I about to be left with naught but the consciousness that I had been alive. Mercifully,
bereavement did not go so far, and my thought went back to Lilith.
Something was taking place in her which we did not know. We knew we did not feel what she felt, but we
knew we felt something of the misery it caused her. The thing itself was in her, not in us; its reflex, her
misery, reached us, and was again reflected in us: she was in the outer darkness, we present with her who was
in it! We were not in the outer darkness; had we been, we could not have been WITH her; we should have
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