According to the custom of modern Greeks, Daphné sings as she plays, while the two girls who dance repeat the refrain.
This is a translation of their words; there is nothing very remarkable about them, and yet they fill one with passionate languor when sung as Daphné can sing them. A young bridegroom is speaking to his bride:
"I am wounded by thy love, alas!
Ah, young maiden! I am consumed by thy love.
I am stricken to the heart.
Let me possess your charms and the flames devour your dower.
Oh, young maiden, I love thee with all my soul,
And thou hast abandoned me,
Like a withered plant."
Noémi and Anathasia seem to act the words by their expressive pantomime.
Noémi, the brunette, who takes the part of the lover, is manly and resolute, while the poses of the blonde Anathasia are timid, supplicating, and chaste, like those of a young girl who shuns or fears the caresses of her lover.
Noémi is tall and slender. Her hair is a golden auburn; her eyebrows and lashes are thick and black, and her eyes are dark gray.
Nothing is more voluptuous than those large, liquid eyes. Her brown skin is perhaps rather too dark, and her mocking, sensual lips too brilliantly scarlet, so violently do they contrast with her white teeth; her smile almost too passionate. Her upper lip is shaded by the slightest possible streak of brown, and her pink nostrils dilate at each movement of her breast, which rises and falls, as she dances, under her close-fitting "yellak," or jacket of cherry-coloured satin. Two long tresses, tied with red satin ribbon, fall from under her scarlet "fez" and reach below her round, flexible waist, that seems smaller by contrast with her broad hips, under their orange-coloured skirt. Nothing was ever more nimble than her little feet, shod in red morocco slippers embroidered with gold.
Anathasia, on the contrary, is petite. Her beautiful fair hair falls in plaits on each side of her cheeks, which are as fresh and rosy as a baby's. Her complexion is dazzlingly fair, and her sweet blue eyes, under their long lashes, seem to reflect all the azure of the Ionian skies.
When the ardent Noémi, singing the words of the despairing lover, approaches her with supplicating and passionate gestures, Anathasia's little mouth, as scarlet as a cherry, becomes quite serious, and she assumes a candid and adorable expression of alarmed innocence. She recoils with a frightened look, and clasps her pretty hands, that are as white as ivory.
Anathasia is all in white.