“But, oh, Father, it is the lyre I want.”
“Theria must not be envious,” said her father seriously. “That would be a new fault in my little girl.”
But her wide, astonished eyes disturbed him and again he kissed the child before he hurried out.
Dryas with little cluckings of delight plucked at his toy, but Theria stood very still. Since she was to have no lyre, was it also true that she was not to go to school?
She seemed in the presence of a calamity which had been approaching since all the days she had been alive, and now was come. With the vagueness of her seven years, yet very deeply, she knew that not going to school meant the parting of the ways between her and Dryas, the closing away from her of precious things. Yet, strangely enough, in her surface, childish self, she did not believe it at all.
Father had not said she could not go. Besides, she had always got what she wanted if she persisted. She knew from her big brother Lycophron what the school was like—a room or portico up near the Precinct, the master teaching Homer all the day long—wonderful stories which one could not forget, boys playing their lyres merrily then hanging them upon the wall to go out and leap and race in contest in the sunshine. Lycophron had gone to school since the beginning of the world.
Theria did not associate Baltè’s warning with this matter at all.
“I go to school to-day,” she began to say softly to herself. “Then I must hurry.”
With a certain anxiety she crossed the court to Lycophron’s room. Yes, there on the chest were his extra stylus and tablets and hanging on the wall a small lyre which in a temper he had broken.