She stopped to gaze at it with that tenderness which we feel toward things asleep and with a reverence born of twelve generations of worship. Men of her blood and bone had here met the god and here had builded his temple. Hers the Precinct had been long before she was born. Hers it would be when she was dead a thousand years.
But how was she to get in? The Precinct was so strictly guarded, the wall so high. Her spirit shrank as she thought of it.
Suddenly Theria heard a footfall coming toward her and quick as a thought she turned down one of the steep streets. Once within the narrow blackness she could see a little—could see the house doors set down and down the terraces, and the Apollo statues standing pillar-like beside each door. No one was abroad in the street.
She passed down the better section and came below into the slave quarter. Here a stench met her which was almost more than she could bear. In this fetid place doors were wide open and crowded slaves snoring within. The sweat and weariness of slaves were the very smell of the place. Was it here that Olen and the kitchen slaves had to come after their day’s work was done? Now she passed some half-naked women asleep in the street. Great pity for them swept her, pity for their slave life and slave lowness. She stooped over one of them, gazing into her face.
The creature awoke with a howl of terror.
“Ye fool,” she cried. “Damned of Hades. If ye come home late as this can’t ye keep still? Ho, I’ll trounce ye.”
The woman leaped to her feet. Theria fled down the street, turned the corner, and fled down another, the woman in full chase, her cries arousing the quarter. Here was real danger. This was the place where thieves and ruffians hid themselves who came to rob the Precinct. But even in her fright Theria had no instinct to run home. She only fled farther away down the hill. She outdistanced the woman, who presently gave up the chase. Then Theria found herself below the town in the depth of the glen.
She was hurt as if the woman had struck her. Never had she heard loathsome oaths such as had been flung after her. Their meaning filled her with horror. Thus much had her cloistering done for her that it had kept her whitely pure. She crouched like a wildwood thing amid the bushes—confused, daunted. Then slowly her determination came back, and she began to climb cautiously upward.
At last she regained the highroad.
While this low adventure was chancing a whole new world had been made—a world of dawn, of faint rose and amethyst under an awakened sky, immense, marvellous, holy.