“My friend Theano stayed after me. When I awoke a few minutes ago, she had not yet come. The fête is perhaps still going on.”
“It is finished,” said another woman. “Theano is down there, by the ceramic wall.”
The courtesans started off at a run, but presently stopped with a smile of pity.
Theano, in a naive fit of drunkenness, was obstinately pulling at a rose stripped of its leaves, the thorns of which were caught in her hair. Her yellow tunic was soiled with red and white stains as if she had borne the brunt of the whole orgie. The bronze clasp, which kept up up the converging folds of the stuff upon her left shoulder, dangled below the waist, and revealed the mobile globe of a young breast already too mature, and which was stained with two spots of purple.
As soon as she saw Myrtocleia, she brusquely went off into a peal of singular laughter. Everybody knew it at Alexandria, and it had procured her the nickname of the “Fowl.” It was an interminable cluck-cluck, a torrent of gaiety which commenced in a very low key and took her breath away, then shot up again into a shrill cry, and so forth, rhythmically, like the joy of a triumphant hen.
“An egg! an egg!” said Philotis.
But Myrtocleia made a gesture:
“Come, Theano, come to bed. You are not well. Come with me.”
“Ah! . . . ha! . . . Ah! . . . ha!” laughed the child. And she took her breast in her little hand, crying in a hoarse voice: