They didn’t condemn or condone her intrusion; she was to them a specter, unseen and unheeded while their communion continued. The personification of grace, they were poised as if asking, “May I throw my spell around you, beautify you as I clothed the very gods?” Aglaia could sense their infinite waiting, triplets frozen in marble for all time, three persons chiseled from one substance. They were a tri-unity of personhood. Aglaia wanted to lose herself in their lifelikeness, to wish them into reality. The pearly grey skin, bellies rounded and buttocks dimpled, dented under their mutual caresses. Did she see the throb of a vein in a neck, or a breast rise and fall? She almost smelled the heat of flesh. Could their noses smell, their tongues taste? She was nearly persuaded, but their eyes gave them away—sightless, flat, no markings of iris or pupil. Now that she studied them in the flesh, so to speak, she couldn’t differentiate them except by their props and their postures.
