“Why so late?” she asks.
“I was standing in front of the door, but you didn’t hear me knock,” I
reply timidly. She closes the door, and clinging to me, she leads me to
the red damask ottoman on which she had been resting. The entire
arrangement of the room is in red damask—wall-paper, curtains,
portieres, hangings of the bed. A magnificent painting of Samson and
Delilah forms the ceiling.
Wanda receives me in an intoxicating dishabille. Her white satin dress
flows gracefully and picturesquely down her slender body, leaving her
arms and breast bare, and carelessly they nestle amid the dark hair of
the great fur of sable, lined with green velvet. Her red hair falls
down her back as far as the hips, only half held by strings of black
pearls.
“Venus in Furs,” I whisper, while she draws me to her breast and
threatens to stifle me with her kisses. Then I no longer speak and
neither do I think; everything is drowned out in an ocean of unimagined
bliss.
“Do you still love me?” she asks, her eye softening in passionate
tenderness.
“You ask!” I exclaimed.
“You still remember your oath,” she continued with an alluring smile,
“now that everything is prepared, everything in readiness, I ask you
once more, is it still your serious wish to become my slave?”
“Am I not ready?” I asked in surprise.
“You have not yet signed the papers.”
“Papers—what papers?”
“Oh, I see, you want to give it up,” she said, “well then, we will let
it go.”
“But Wanda,” I said, “you know that nothing gives me greater happiness
than to serve you, to be your slave. I would give everything for the
sake of feeling myself wholly in your power, even unto death—”
“How beautiful you are,” she whispered, “when you speak so
enthusiastically, so passionately. I am more in love with you than ever
and you want me to be dominant, stern, and cruel. I am afraid, it will
be impossible for me to be so.”
“I am not afraid,” I replied smiling, “where are the papers?’”
“So that you may know what it means to be absolutely in my power, I
have drafted a second agreement in which you declare that you have
decided to kill yourself. In that way I can even kill you, if I so
desire.”
“Give them to me.”
While I was unfolding the documents and reading them, Wanda got pen and
ink. She then sat down beside me with her arm about my neck, and looked
over my shoulder at the paper.
The first one read: