"Always a woman!" she muttered with disappointment and with impatience.
"Always a woman," he echoed as he pointed to the god Hermes. "And there is your creator."
"He!"
She looked rapidly and wistfully at the white-winged god.
"Yes. He made Woman; for he made her mind out of treachery and her words out of the empty wind. Hephæstus made her heart, fusing for it brass and iron. Their work has worn well. It has not changed in all these ages. But what is your history? Go and lie yonder, where you were last night, and tell me your story while I work."
She obeyed him and told him what she knew; lying there, where he had motioned her, in the shadow under the figures of the three grandsons of Chaos. He listened, and wrought on at her likeness.
The story, as she told it in her curt imperfect words, was plain enough to him, though to herself obscure. It had in some little measure a likeness to his own.
It awakened a certain compassion for her in his heart, which was rarely moved to anything like pity. For to him nature was so much and man so little, the one so majestic and so exhaustless, the other so small and so ephemeral, that human wants and human woes touched him but very slightly. His own, even at their darkest, moved him rather to self-contempt than to self-compassion, for these were evils of the body and of the senses.
As a boy he had had no ear to the wail of the frozen and famishing people wandering homeless over the waste of drifted snow, where but the night before a village had nestled in the mountain hollow; all his senses had been given in a trance of awe and rapture to the voices of the great winds sweeping down from the heights through the pine-forests, and the furious seas below gnashing and raging on the wreck-strewn strand. It was with these last that he had had kinship and communion: these endured always; but for the men they slew, what were they more in the great sum of time than forest-leaves or ocean driftwood?
And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees, and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and hums in every song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell, every bead of water that ripples in a brook—to these the mortal life of man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent; tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity. Hence pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the perpetual torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every thinking creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints all creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are nurtured, at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and nightly assails the unknown God in piteous protest at the inexorable laws of inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering was thus universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of the two he pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:—the horse staggering beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness, and old age; the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or stumbling through the hooting crowd, blind, footsore and shivering to its last home in the slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its noble life inch by inch under the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the hand of the vivisector while he drove his probe through its quivering nerves; the unutterable hell in which all these gentle, kindly and long-suffering creatures dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the avarice or the brutality of men,—these he pitied perpetually, with a tenderness for them that was the softest thing in all his nature.