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can nonetheless tell you that he hasn’t. I’ve often enlarged and whipped other girls for him, but you’re the first one I’ve marked for him. I do believe he loves you, for once in his life.”
    Then she sent O into the bathroom, telling her to bathe and freshen up while Monique was off fetching her a collar and wrist bracelets.
    O began to draw her bath, removed her makeup, brushed her hair, stepped into the bathtub, and, once immersed in the refreshing warmth, began slowly to soap herself She paid no attention to what she was doing, letting her mind wander as she tried to picture, with a mixture of curiosity and pleasure, the girls who, before her, had caught Sir Stephen’s fancy. Curiosity: she would have liked to know them. She was not really surprised that he had had all of them enlarged and whipped, but she was nonetheless jealous that there had been others before her, that she had not been the first for him. Standing up in the bathtub, bent over with her back to the mirror that covered the wall, she gently soaped her buttocks and the inside of her thighs, then rinsed herself to remove the suds and shifted her buttocks to look at herself in the mirror: that is what she would have liked to see, the other girls in just such a pose. How long had he kept them? So she had not been mistaken when she had had the feeling that others before had followed-naked and submissive and in a state of fear and trembling-Sir Stephen’s faithful old retainer Norah. But that she had been the only one to bear his irons and the mark on her buttocks overwhelmed her with a feeling of happiness.
    She stepped out of the water and began to dry herself. She heard Anne-Marie’s voice through the bathroom door, calling her.
    On Anne-Marie’s bed, which was covered with a hand-embroidered purple and white percale counterpane, identical to the double drapes that framed the window, there was a pile of long dresses, corsets, mules with high heels, and the strongbox which contained the wrist bracelets. Anne-Marie, who was seated on the foot of the bed, made O kneel down in front of her, then took from one of her trouser pockets the flat key which unlocked the collars and bracelets and which she kept attached to her belt by a long thin chain. She tried a number of collars on O, until she found one that, without choking her, fit her snugly enough half way up the neck so that it was difficult to turn it in one direction or the other and yet it was even more difficult to insert a finger between the metal and the neck itself. The same applied to her wrists, to which the bracelets were fastened just above the pulse, which was left unencumbered.
    The collar and bracelets that O had worn herself and seen others wear the previous year had been of leather, and had been worn much more tightly. These were of stainless steel, made in such a way as to be slightly flexible like certain wristwatch bands. They were about two inches wide, and each had a ring of the same metal. Never had the leather accouterments of the previous year felt so cold, nor had they given O such a strong impression of being so irrevocably in chains. The metal was the same color and the same dull finish as the irons attached to her nether lips. Anne-Marie said to her, her words coinciding with the final click of the closing collar, that she would never remove either collar or bracelets, day or night, not even when she bathed, during her entire stay at Roissy.
    O got to her feet, and Monique took her by the hand and led her over in front of a full-length, three-sided mirror where she applied a light red, slightly liquid lipstick to her lips with a tiny brush:
    O noted that the color darkened as it dried. With the same red, she painted her nipples, including the tips, and then the tiny lips between her thighs, emphasizing the upper reaches of the slit. O never learned what product she used, but it was more some kind of dye than makeup: it did not come off when it was rubbed, and even when