At the door he paused again with bent head. “You will have your wish now to stay a virgin. And you can never come home again.”
She was alone. It is in such moments that one grows old. Maturity is not of years but of such experience. She was neither happy nor sad. What she had desired so long seemed strangely impossible now that it had come to her. There was no exaltation for the great task.
She kept naming the task over to herself. “I am to win the good oracle which will save Athens. Apollo will give me a good answer if I supplicate.” But she felt very dazed.
Now she laid aside her hated weaving. It was the last time. The Pythia did not weave. Greater tasks were hers. Theria’s home which had seemed so prison-like, that, too, she was leaving for ever. Very quietly she walked along the balcony to her own room and there stood thinking.
How distant her father had seemed. The great state-sorrow weighed him down. He was beyond thought of her. Yet there had been something tragic in his face as though he were laying her as victim upon the altar rather than lifting her to the tripod.
A fearful thing that tripod. It stood in a dark cavern, and the breath of the god rushed up from a gulf below and filled her who was set there. How would it feel—that breath upon her? What would it do to her, that ghostly thing? She shook her shoulders as if to free them of a load.
Oh, dear Paian, what if it did harm her? That was nothing, nothing! Could she win the good message? Could she by prayers, importunity, and ritual-supplication win from the god the better fate for Greece? Apollo had already given forth the terror and warning. Could she push that evil back as with her two hands?
All the courage, the confidence, which had so easily been hers sank out of her. Her heart, which had been like a pool reflecting the sky of the god, was suddenly empty. She longed to go to her mother to hide in her arms. But Melantho (how well she knew) would only weep and add weakness to her own. Her father? It had been her father’s detachment, his way of laying the task impersonally upon her, forgetting the daughter upon whom he laid it—it was this that made her lonely. She thought of Dryas, of Lycophron, of Baltè. She could only hide her face in her hands, rejecting the thought of each. And the black loneliness grew at each rejection.
“Is there someone else? Isn’t there any one else?” she thought wildly.