At the mention of the word milk the face of the petitioning fool, ugly enough when untroubled by crosses, took upon itself an expression so hideous that if the girl’s spirit had ever permitted her to recoil from any terror she might have recoiled from that.
“Milk!” he yelped, and the sound of his voice was as ugly as the show of his face. “Milk! Gods of the Greeks! Milk! Your father is no less than a fool to favor such liquor.”
The girl’s red eyebrows knitted. “Unless you mend your manners,” she said, decisively, “you shall go as thirsty as you came. You dare not speak so to my father’s face.”
The fool answered with a little crackling laugh, while the wide sweep of his withered fingers seemed at once to plead for forgiveness and to justify impertinence.
“Fair virgin of the heights and of the hollows,” he cackled, “I would speak so to his face or to his foot or to any part of his honorable anatomy, for, you see, I am a fool myself, and may pass the crazy name without cuffing. Come, I will sip your white syrup to please you.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders at the sudden condescension. “Please yourself. There is water, if you disdain milk.”
The hunchback twisted his pliant features into a new and peculiarly repulsive form of protest.
“Even as there is the devil if you escape from the deep sea,” he sneered. “I begin to lust after milk now.”
The maiden looked at him for a moment, with a curious pity for his changing moods and his changeless deformity. Then she turned and entered her home, from which she emerged a moment later with a vessel of milk in one hand and a silver cup in the other. She filled the cup with milk and handed it to the fool, who took it from her fingers with an ill grace. His spiteful eyes grinned at the white fluid malignly, as if whatever it emblemed of purity, of simplicity, exasperated him. He leered up again at the girl with the same visible rage at her purity, her simplicity, and he made a little tilting motion with his fingers, as if the devil in him were minded to dash the milk in the maid’s face. But her indifference defied him and the thirst tugged at his throat.
“Water is the drink of the wise,” the girl said, steadily. “But milk is the wine of the gods.”