"A popular expression of the world's joy over the summer. That was its original motive, but it has been conventionalized into a feast formally celebrating the reign of Flora. It was pastoral, but the poor cities walled away from the wheat and the pastures adopted it, in very hunger for the feel of the earth. It falls in the spring under the revivifying influence of awakening life and the loosed spirit of the populace grows boisterous. We become a city of rustics and hoidens. Pleasure is the purpose and love the largess of the occasion."
Agrippa smiled absently. These two remarks of diverse character were tentative. She was sounding Marsyas' nature.
"I shall not sail till it is done," Agrippa declared.
"A rare diversion to tempt a man from his ambitions," the young Essene retorted quickly. Junia had made her sounding. She persisted in her latter rôle.
"It is," she averred. "Flora is elected among the beautiful girls of the theaters; she typifies universal love; she runs, leaving a trail of yellow roses behind her, which lead the multitude on to the delight she means to take for herself—and that is all. It is merely a pretty feast, but the world is made of many well-meaning though blundering natures; and the revel does not always reach the high mark of refinement at its highest."
Agrippa's eyes on the Roman woman expressed intensest amusement and admiration, though they lost nothing of their cool self-possession.
"My lord," Marsyas observed coldly, "there are as choice evils in Rome."
Junia laughed.
"Evil! Tut, tut! How monstrous serious the little world takes itself! How great is its problems, how towering its philosophies, how bad its badness! See us wrinkle our little old brows and smile agedly over the creature impulses of children and forget that the gods sit on the brink of Olympus and smile at us. How we deplore the Feast of Flora—and out upon us! None—save perchance thyself, good sir, and thy rigid order—but goes reveling after pleasure and chooses a love or casts a stone at an offender—and soberly calls it a crisis or a principle! Philosophy! Discovering the obvious! Badness! Only nature, more or less emphatic! All a matter of meat and drink, shelter and apparel and the recreation of ourselves! Everything else is merely an attribute of the simple essentials. Is it not so, good sir?"
Marsyas shook his head. For the first time in his life he had heard the world forgiven and the sound of it was good. He could not help remembering Lydia's words, in contrast. But he was not convinced.