A Daughter of Delilah — page 88: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE TONGUE OF THE TEMPTRESS. "9 take absinthe after her coffee in proportions equal to his own, but there was something immensely bewitching in the way she smoked her cigarettes. When he thought of his gentle sister, he fancied her horror of a scene like this. But why make comparisons? Beside this splendid creature, Minnie was but a rush-light before the moon! Here was a woman of passions as strong as his own—a woman whose very presence swayed him into adoring submission. So deeply was he sated with the follies—with the in- dulgencies that ever prostitute themselves before young men of fashion, weak of purpose and gilded with the dross that makes happiness and misery—so deeply sated was he that nothing would have appealed to his senses. Nothing would have satisfied his fierce desires for change, had it not been full of unhealthy excitement. This woman, with her splendid beauty, her rare figure, her loud laughter and alluring ways, intoxicated him with madness. His finer instincts told him that he dis- approved of the cigarettes, that the liquors which she drank so readily were scarcely in keeping with the future Mrs. Edgar Alston. Yet he was powerless to stay his mad career. He would not if he could, and he knelt at her feet and poured out his passion again and again. ‘““Tsabel, within two weeks you shall be mine for ever- more!’’ he said, fiercely. ‘‘Do you know what bitterness it is to have to leave you? Heavens! I cannot stand it! And I have to meet my father with a smiling face and agony in my heart—the agony of a bitter suspense!” “hen let it nerve you to be up and doing, Edgar,”’ was the siren’s reply. ‘‘There is danger in delay. If he be- Gomichbooks (E(0)