“Venus stretched her arms, and said, ‘Cool Adonis, fool Adonis, Hasten to my golden bed—’”
Perpetua’s face flamed, and she put her fingers in her ears. “Away with you! away with you!” she commanded.
The fool stopped in his measure; it was no use piping to deaf ears. “Farewell, fair prudery,” he chuckled, and in a series of fantastic hops and bounds he reached the edge of the pine wood and soon was lost to sight within its sheltering depths.
II
THE COMING OF THE KING
When the last gleam of the fool’s parti-colored habit had disappeared in the sanctuary of the wood, Perpetua took her hands from her ears and seated herself on a fragment of a fallen column that had formerly made part of the colonnade of the Temple of Venus. Here she sat for a while with her hands listlessly clasped, trying to disentangle the puzzling web of her thoughts. Her most immediate sensation was delight at the departure of Diogenes. The warm, fair day seemed to have grown old and cold with his world wisdom, a wisdom so different from all that she had ever been taught to venerate as wise.
“If I were a bird,” she sighed aloud, “I could not sing while he was near. If I were a flower, I should fade at his coming.”
She rose from her throne and blew kisses on her finger-tips to the birds that sang about her, to the flowers that flamed beneath her feet. “Be happy, birds,” she whispered; “be happy, flowers, for the withered fool has gone.”