They might grow pale and die if they were to pass many days forgotten in the depths of her casket.
After that she kept on ransacking the perfumed jewel-box for all the gems that were her great pride,--earrings and finger-rings of great price, mixed with other exotic jewels of bizarre form and slight value, picked up on her voyages.
"Look carefully at this," she said gravely to Ferragut, while she rubbed against her bare arm an enormous diamond in one of her rings.
Warmed by the friction, the precious stone became converted into a magnet.

A bit of paper placed a few inches away was attracted to it with an irresistible fluttering.
She then rubbed one of the barbaric imitation-jewels of thick cut glass, and the scrap of paper remained motionless without the slightest evidence of attraction.
Satisfied with these experiments, she replaced her treasures in the casket and set herself to beguiling the passing monotony, again devoting herself to Ulysses.
These long imprisonments in an atmosphere charged with perfumes, Oriental tobaccos, and feminine seduction were gradually disordering Ferragut's mind.

Besides this, he was drinking heavily in order to give new vigor to his organism which was beginning to break down under the excesses of his voluptuous seclusion.

At the slightest sign of weariness, Freya would fall upon him with her dominating lips.

If she freed herself from his embraces, it was to offer him a glass full of the strongest liquor.
When the spell of intoxication overcame him, weighing down his eyes, he always recalled the same dream.