They both wore maidens’ girdles, which circled round the hips and buckled low down upon the body below the navel. They were the musicians of the night, the singing-girl and one of the flute-girls.
The flute-girl was younger and prettier than her friend. Her eyes smiled faintly, pale as the blue of her robe, half hidden under her eyelids. Her two slender flutes hung dangling from her flowered shoulder-knot along her back. A double iris-garland, fastened to the ankles by two silver anklets, undulated beneath the gauzy robe and encircled the rounded legs.
She said:
“Myrtocleia, do not be sad because you have lost our tablets. Would you ever have forgotten that you possess the love of Rhodis, and can you think, naughty girl, you would ever have read in solitude the line written by my hand? Am I one of those faithless friends who engrave their bed-sister’s name upon their nail and unite themselves to another girl as soon as the nail has grown to the limit? Do you need a souvenir of me when you have my living body? I am barely of nubile age, and yet I was not half so old on the day I saw you for the first time. You remember it well. It was at the bath. Our mothers took us in their arms and held us towards one another. We played for a long time on the marble before putting on our clothes again. We have never left one another since that day, and, five years afterward, we loved each other.”
Myrtocleia answered:
“There is another first day, Rhodis, and you know it. It is the day you linked our two names together in writing upon the tablets. That was the first day! It will never come back again. But never mind. Each day is new for me, and when you awake towards evening, it is as if I saw you for the first time, You are not a girl at all: you are a little Arcadian nymph that has left her forests because Phoibos has dried up her fountain. Your body is supple as an olive branch, your skin is soft as water in summer, the iris circles about your legs, and you wear the lotus-flower like Astarte the open fig. In what wood haunted by immortals did your mother betake her to sleep before your thrice-blessed birth? and what roaming ægipan, or what river-god united himself with her in the grass? When we have left this terrible African soil, you shall take me to your fountain, far beyond Psophis and Phenens, to vast shady forests where, upon the soft earth, one may see the double footprints of satyrs and light-treading nymphs. There you shall search out a smooth rock, and you shall engrave upon the stone the words you wrote upon the wax: the words that are our joy. Listen, listen, Rhodis! By the girdle of Aphrodite upon which all desires are embroidered, all desires are unknown to me; for you are more than my dream! By the horn of Amaltheia whence flow all the good things of the world, the world is a matter of indifference to me; for you are the only good I have found in it! When I look at you and when I see myself, I know not why you love me in return. Your hair is as fair as ears of corn; mine is black as a ram’s fleece. Your skin is as white as shepherd’s cheese; mine is brown as the sand upon the beach. Your tender breast is as flowered as the orange tree in autumn; mine is meagre and barren as the rock pine. If my face has gained in beauty, it is because I have loved you. O Rhodis! well you know that my singular virginity is like the lips of Pan eating a sprig of myrtle; yours is the colour of roses, and dainty as the mouth of a little child. I do not know why you love me; but if you ceased to love me for a day; if, like your sister Theano who plays the flute by your side, you ever stayed to sleep in the houses that employ us, then I should never even think of sleeping alone in our bed, and when you came in you would find me strangled with my girdle.”
The very idea was so wild and cruel that Rhodis’s long eyes filled with smiles and tears. She placed her foot upon a street-post:
“My flowers between my legs hamper me. Undo them, adored Myrto. I have finished dancing for to-night.”
The singing-girl started.
