l remember very
well how at one of the great Dionysiac festivals, fired by the power of
the god, you rushed through the streets with a deer-skin over your
shoulders."

"That was delightful--lovely!" cried Doris with sparkling eyes. "But
thirty years since it was all different, very different. I have told you
before now how I went with our maid-servant into the Canopic way to the
house of my aunt Archidike to look on at the great procession. I had not
far to go for we lived near the Theatre, my father was stage-manager and
yours was one of the chief singers in the chorus. We hurried along, but
all sorts of people stopped us, and drunken men wanted to joke with me."

"Ah, you were as sweet as a rose-bud then," her son interrupted.

"As a rose-bud, yes, but not like your lovely rose," said the old woman.
"At any rate I looked nice enough for the men in disguise--fauns and
satyrs and were the cynic hypocrites in their ragged cloaks, to think it
worth while to look at me and to take a rap on the knuckles when they
tried to put an arm round me or to steal a kiss, I did not care for the
handsomest of them, for Euphorion had done for me with his fiery
glances--not with words for I was very strictly kept and he had never
been able to get a chance to speak to me. At the corner of the Canopic
way and the Market street we could get no farther, for the crowd had
blocked the way and were howling and storming as they stared at a party
of Klodones and other Maenads, who in their sacred fury were tearing a
goat to pieces with their teeth. I shuddered at the spectacle, but I must
need stare with the rest and shout and halloo as they did. My maid, who I
held on to tightly, was seized with the frenzy and dragged me into the
middle of the circle close up to the bleeding sacrifice. Two of the
possessed women sprang upon us, and I felt one clasping me tightly and
trying to throw me down. It was a horrible moment but I defended myself
bravely and had succeeded in keeping on my feet when your father sprang
forward, set me free and led me away. What happened after I could not
tell you now; it was one of those wild happy dreams in which you must
hold your heart with both hands for fear it should crack with joy, or fly
out and away up to the sky and in the very eye of the sun. Late in the
evening I got home and a week after I was Euphorion's wife."

"We have exactly followed your example," said Pollux, "and if Arsinoe
grows to be like my dear o