Eurydice (Ruhl play) a piece of string, and Eurydice's father reads to her from "King Lear". Orpheus sends another letter, and then resolves to go to the Underworld himself to find her. In the third movement, Orpheus arrives at the gates of the Underworld, singing a song so powerful it makes the Stones weep. The Lord of the Underworld tells him that he may take Eurydice back, but only if he does not turn around to look at her. Eurydice is then faced with the decision to either stay with her father or go back with her husband. At her father's insistence, she
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