Women have quick eyes. Melitta, with a single glance, received an impression of his whole person. The tall, grave, bearded man seemed to her to resemble her father—the only free citizen whom in her monotonous life in the women’s apartments she had had an opportunity to notice. She let the child go in first, and turned her head again. Melitta was very fond of her father. She wanted to see whether she had been right—whether the man in the next garden resembled him.
At the young girl’s movement a flood of joy swept through Callippides’ heart, and he became even happier when he fancied he read good-will in the look with which Melitta gazed at him.
The sycophant was not spoiled by good-will.
When Melitta had disappeared he walked towards the house as if in a dream. At the sun-dial he found old Manes who, bending over the pin, was in the act of reading the hour. He looked intently at him but the slave did not seem to have noticed anything.
Callippides went into the “treasure-chamber” and took his seat in the arm-chair. He imagined that he still saw Melitta with the purple fillet around her black curls, with her dark eyes, smiling lips, and dazzling shoulders. There was something in the girl’s fresh youth which moved his inmost soul. He, the voluptuary, who was ever seeking to devise some new pleasure, thought that the highest joy he could fancy would be to hold Melitta’s hand in his.
“By the Graces!” he exclaimed, “she is a living human flower.”
Suddenly it became evident to him that in a few moments, a far shorter time than the water-clock required to run out, he had become an entirely different person. A shudder ran through his limbs and—as if afraid to hear his own words, he murmured softly:
“Callippides no longer belongs to himself.”
When he again raised his head and looked at the walls they seemed to him, for the first time, as they had appeared to Manes. He did not like the inscriptions, there was something about them which disturbed him, so he went into the next room and threw himself on a couch where he fell into deep thought. He lay thus a long time; the day declined more and more, the short twilight merged into the deep shades of evening. When he roused himself and looked through the open door the stars were shining over the peristyle.
He called Manes and told him to light the lamp.