She proceeded to execute her ballet, her pas seul, her dance of immortal shame and fatal infamy. Cries of delight arose. The creature grew frantic. The court of Herod fell into two parties. One party proclaimed the performance a perfection of elegance and spirit. The other party said not a word, but glances of painful feeling passed among them. The clamorous eulogists formed the large majority. In the silent minority was numbered Paulus, who never in his life had felt such grave disgust or such settled indignation. He thought of his pure and innocent Esther—alas, not his! He thought that, had it been his sister Agatha who thus outraged every rudimentary principle of the tacit social compact, he could almost find it in his heart to relieve the earth of her.
Thus pondering, his glance fell upon Herod the tetrarch. The tetrarch seemed to have become delirious. He was laughing, and crying, and slobbering, and clapping his hands, and rolling his head, and rocking his body on the great state cushion under the canopy, where he "sat at table." While Paulus was contemplating him in wonder and shame, the wretched dancer came to an end of her bounds. Indecency, scientifically accidental, had been the one simple principle of the exhibition. Herod called the practised female before him, and, in the hearing of several, bade her demand from him any reward she pleased, and declared upon oath that he would grant her demand. Paulus heard the answer. After consulting apart with her mother, she reapproached the tetrarch, and, with a flushed face, said that she desired the head of a prisoner upon a dish.
"What prisoner?"
"John," said she.
Paulus gazed at the miserable tetrarch, "the quarter of a king," not from the height of his rank as a Roman general, but from the still greater height which God had given him as one of the first, one of the earliest of European gentlemen. He knew not then who John was. But that any fellow-creature in prison, not otherwise to be put to death, should have his head hewn off and placed upon a dish, because a woman had tossed her limbs to and fro in a style which pleased a tetrarch while it disgraced human society, appeared to Paulus to be less than reasonable. What he had said, the tetrarch had said upon oath.
A little confusion, a slight murmuring and whispering ensued, but the courtly music soon recommenced. Paulus could not afterward tell how long it was before the most awful scene he had ever witnessed occurred.
A menial entered, bearing, on a large dish, a freshly-severed human head, bleeding at the neck.
"It was not a jest, then," said Paulus, in a low voice to his next neighbor, a very old man, whose face he remembered, but whose name he had all the evening been trying in vain to recall—"it was not a base jest, dictated by the hideous taste of worse than barbarians!"
"Truly," replied the aged man, "these Jews are worse than any barbarians I ever saw, and I have seen most of them."
Paulus recognized at these words the geographer Strabo, formerly his companion at the court of Augustus.