"And at the little house, not the big one, leave the flowers for the sick
Selene."
"The daughter of the fat steward, who was attacked by our big dog?" asked
Mastor, curiously.
"She or another," said Antinous, impatiently, "and when they ask you who sent the flowers, say 'the friend at Lochias,' nothing more. You understand."
The slave nodded and said to himself: "What! you too-oh! these women."
Antinous signed to him to be silent, impressed on him in a few hasty words that he was to be discreet and to pick out the very choicest flowers, and then betook himself into the hall of the Muses to seek Pollux. From him he had learnt where to find the suffering Selene, of whom he could not help thinking incessantly and wherever he might be. He did not find the sculptor in his screened-off nook; prompted by a wish to speak to his mother, Pollux had gone down to the gatehouse where he was now standing before her and frankly narrating, with many eager gestures of his long arms, all that had occurred on the previous night. His story flowed on like a song of triumph, and when he described how the holiday procession had carried away Arsinoe and himself, the old woman jumped up from her chair and clapping her fat little hands, she exclaimed:
"Ah! that is pleasure, that is happiness! I remember flying along with your father in just the same way thirty years ago."
"And since thirty years," Pollux interposed. "I can still remember very well how at one of the great Dionysiac festivals, fired by the power of the god, you rushed through the streets with a deer-skin over your shoulders."
"That was delightful—lovely!" cried Doris with sparkling eyes. "But thirty years since it was all different, very different. I have told you before now how I went with our maid-servant into the Canopic way to the house of my aunt Archidike to look on at the great procession. I had not far to go for we lived near the Theatre, my father was stage-manager and yours was one of the chief singers in the chorus. We hurried along, but all sorts of people stopped us, and drunken men wanted to joke with me."
"Ah, you were as sweet as a rose-bud then," her son interrupted.
"As a rose-bud, yes, but not like your lovely rose," said the old woman. "At any rate I looked nice enough for the men in disguise—fauns and satyrs and were the cynic hypocrites in their ragged cloaks, to think it worth while to look at me and to take a rap on the knuckles when they tried to put an arm round me or to steal a kiss, I did not care for the handsomest of them, for Euphorion had done for me with his fiery glances—not with words for I was very strictly kept and he had never been able to get a chance to speak to me. At the corner of the Canopic way and the Market street we could get no farther, for the crowd had blocked the way and were howling and storming as they stared at a party of Klodones and other Maenads, who in their sacred fury were tearing a goat to pieces with their teeth. I shuddered at the spectacle, but I must need stare with the rest and shout and halloo as they did. My maid, who I held on to tightly, was seized with the frenzy and dragged me into the middle of the circle close up to the bleeding sacrifice. Two of the possessed women sprang upon us, and I felt one clasping me tightly and trying to throw me down. It was a horrible moment but I defended myself bravely and had succeeded in keeping on my feet when your father sprang forward, set me free and led me away. What happened after I could not tell you now; it was one of those wild happy dreams in which you must hold your heart with both hands for fear it should crack with joy, or fly out and away up to the sky and in the very eye of the sun. Late in the evening I got home and a week after I was Euphorion's wife."