VI
CHRYSIS’S ROSE
It was a procession, white and blue and yellow and pink and green.
Thirty courtesans advanced, bearing baskets of flowers, snow-white doves with red feet, veils of the most fragile azure, and precious ornaments.
An old white-bearded priest, swathed to the head in stiff unbleached cloth, preceded the youthful band and guided the line of bending worshippers to the altar of stone.
They sang, and their song languished like the sea, sighed like a southern breeze, panted like an amorous mouth. The first two carried harps which they rested upon the hollow of their left hand and which curved forward like sickles of slender wood.
One of them advanced and said:
“Tryphera, O beloved Cypris, offers thee this blue veil which she has woven herself, that thou mayest continue to deal gently with her.”
Another: