“I must go now,” said Sappho, and her eyes snapped with excitement, looking dark as deep water at night. “We are the first. Soon now my name will be on the lips of all these people, they will be shouting for me, will be throwing flowers upon me....” She stopped, clasping her hands over her young bosom, and throwing her head back to gaze into the sky. “Sometimes I feel that the world itself will call my name aloud, not now alone, but on and on till time is old.”
The sudden colour flooded her face, and she smiled a flashing glance at her friends, who were looking at her with an excitement almost equalling her own.
“Wish me good fortune,” she begged.
“We do, we do. You will win, I know it....”
She gave them each a quick embrace, bent before her mother, and followed her father toward a little doorway beyond the tier of seats. Before entering this, she turned and waved to the girls, who were still standing watching her.
“Isn’t she simply a Jim-Dandy?” the irrepressible Rose wanted to know.
“Sit down now,” said the gentle voice of Sappho’s mother, as she settled herself on her own broad bench, over which a scarlet cloth was laid. “In a moment you will see all the girls who are to run come out through that little door almost opposite—see, there they come.”
And as she spoke a bevy of young things, all of them in a short white one-piece slip that left the arms and legs bare, came pouring out into the arena. Each of them carried a torch in her hand, whose flame bent and fluttered in the breeze.
Straining their eyes to look, the girls distinguished Sappho among the others. She had bound her hair with a broad scarlet ribbon and stood very light and proud, looking fit and ready even at this distance.
Men in brilliant cloaks were moving among the girls, assigning them their places. Presently they drew back, leaving a line of eager young figures, tense and tremulous with excitement. Suddenly, at a signal the girls did not see, they were off.