Eurydice (Ruhl play) the third movement. The play begins with Eurydice and Orpheus, two young lovers, who are about to get married. In the Underworld, Eurydice's dead father has managed to preserve his memory and his ability to read and write, and tries to send her letters. During the wedding, Eurydice goes outside to get a drink of water and she meets a man (the "Nasty Interesting Man") who tells her he has a letter from her father. Eurydice decides to go to his apartment to retrieve the letter, but as she leaves his apartment after resisting the man's attempts to seduce her,
The Stress of Her Regard beings as having qualities of vampires, succubi, incubi, Lamia, fairies, and jinn. Not only predators but sometimes benefactors of humans, they are the basis for both the Muses and the Graeae. The novel's title is taken from the poem "Sphinx and Medusa" by Clark Ashton Smith ("...Yet thought must see/That eve of time when man no longer yearns,/Grown deaf before Life's Sphinx, whose lips are barred;/When from the spaces of Eternity,/Silence, a rigorous Medusa, turns/On the lost world the stress of her regard."). The story begins shortly before the wedding of Michael Crawford, a doctor. The night before he marries