CHAPTER I
On the Road to the Land of the Gods
“He ne’er is crown’d with immortality
Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.”
“Oh, Persephone, Persephone!... Surely Koré is in Hell.”
This is a discouraged voice from the window.
“Peripatetica, that sounds both insane and improper. Would it fatigue you too much to explain in the vernacular what you are trying, in your roundabout way, to suggest?”
Thus Jane, a mere diaphanous mauve cloud, from which the glimmering fire picked out glittering points here and there. When Jane takes to teagowns she is really very dressy.
Peripatetica strolled up and down the dusky drawing-room two or three times, without answering. Outside a raging wind drove furiously before it in the darkness the snow that flew upward in long spirals, like desperate hunted ghosts. Finally she took up a book from the table, and kneeling, to get the light from the logs on the page, began to read aloud.
These two were on such kindly terms that either one could read aloud without arousing the other to open violence.
“Persephone, sometimes called Koré—” read Peripatetica, “having been seized by Pluto, as she gathered narcissus, and wild thyme, and mint, and the violet into her green kirtle—was carried, weeping very bitterly, into his dark hell. And Demeter, her mother, missing her fair and sweet-curled daughter, sought her through all the world with tears and ravings; the bitter sound and moisture of her grief making a noise as of winter wind and rain. And her warm heart being so cold with pain the blossoms died on her bosom, and her vernal hair was shredded abroad into the air, and all growing things drooped and perished, and her brown benignant face became white as the face of the dead are white——”