Sardou's Cleopatra — page 69: what you’re looking at

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

54 SARDOWS CLEOPATRA. she advanced rapidly and brushed Antony’s fore- head with her lips. ‘Then, retreating, she circled about him, sometimes leaning backward with half closed eyes and dishevelled hair like a Bac- chante in the festival of the god of the grape, and sometimes laughing and more capricious in her movements than a butterfly amidst the flowers. It was a marvelous exhibition of voluptuous grace and languorous passion. Antony’s blood bounded hotly through his veins, and more madly than ever did he adore this incomparable siren of the Nile. To love Cleopatra was to love twenty women, to love all women, she was so changeable, so variable, so many-sided—a veritable chameleon. She knew with a thousand arts how to awaken satiated pas- sion and to fix inconstancy itself. At last, flushed and panting, she threw herself down beside her lover, and, winding her arms about him, pillowed her head upon his breast. He strained her to him in a rapturous ecstasy. A smile that had something of sarcasm in it played about Charmian’s lips. She remembered Cesar. But a tear trembled on the lashes of the Greek girl, Iras. She was thinking of the slave who lay hidden in the cell beneath the temple of | comicbooks.co