Peripatetica closed the book, put it back on the table, and drew a hassock under her for a seat.
“I see,” said Jane. “Demeter is certainly passing this way to-night, poor dear! It’s a pity she can’t realize Persephone, that sweet soul of Spring, will come back. She always does come back.”
“Yes; but Demeter, the mother-earth, always fears that this time she may not; that Pluto will keep her in hell always. And every time she makes the same outcry about it.”
“I suppose she always finds her first in Enna,” Jane hazarded. “Isn’t Enna in Sicily?”
“Yes, I think so; but I don’t know much about Sicily, though everybody goes there nowadays. Let’s go there, Jane, and help Demeter find Persephone.”
“Let’s!” agreed Jane, with sympathetic enthusiasm, and they went.
Now, being Americans, and therefore accustomed to the most obliging behaviour on the part of the male sex, it never occurred to them that Pluto might be ungallant enough to object to their taking a hand in. But he did—as they might have foreseen would be likely in a person so unmannerly as to snatch lovely daughters from devoted mothers.
It began on the ocean. On quite a calm evening a wave, passing from under the side of the ship, threw its crest back—perhaps to look at the stars—and fell head over heels into their open port. Certainly as much as two tons of green and icy Atlantic entered impulsively, and by the time they were dried out and comforted by the tight-corseted, rosy, sympathetic Lemon every object they possessed was a mere bunch of depressed rumples. Throughout the rest of the voyage they presented the unfortunate appearance of having slept in their clothes, including their hats. These last, which they had believed refreshingly picturesque, or coquettish, at starting, had that defiantly wretched aspect displayed by the broody hen after she has been dipped in the rain-barrel to check her too exuberant aversion to race-suicide.
That was how Pluto began, and it swiftly went from bad to worse.