resentation. Literature, he knew, could not
exist without some meaning, and considerations of right and wrong were to
a certain extent inseparable from the conception of life, but to insist
on ethics as the chief interest of the human pageant was surely absurd.
One might as well read _Lycidas_ for the sake of its denunciation of
"our corrupted Clergy," or Homer for "manners and customs." An artist
entranced by a beautiful landscape did not greatly concern himself with
the geological formation of the hills, nor did the lover of a wild sea
inquire as to the chemical analysis of the water. Lucian saw a colored
and complex life displayed before him, and he sat enraptured at the
spectacle, not concerned to know whether actions were good or bad, but
content if they were curious.

In this spirit he made a singular study of corruption. Beneath his feet,
as he sat in the garden porch, was a block of marble through which there
ran a scarlet stain. It began with a faint line, thin as a hair, and grew
as it advanced, sending out offshoots to right and left, and broadening
to a pool of brilliant red. There were strange lives into which he looked
that were like the block of marble; women with grave sweet faces told him
the astounding tale of their adventures, and how, they said, they had met
the faun when they were little children. They told him how they had
played and watched by the vines and the fountains, and dallied with the
nymphs, and gazed at images reflected in the water pools, till the
authentic face appeared from the wood. He heard others tell how they had
loved the satyrs for many years before they knew their race; and there
were strange stories of those who had longed to speak but knew not the
word of the enigma, and searched in all strange paths and ways before
they found it.

He heard the history of the woman who fell in love with her slave-boy,
and tempted him for three years in vain. He heard the tale from the
woman's full red lips, and watched her face, full of the ineffable
sadness of lust, as she described her curious stratagems in mellow
phrases. She was drinking a sweet yellow wine from a gold cup as she
spoke, and the odor in her hair and the aroma of the precious wine seemed
to mingle with the soft strange words that flowed like an unguent from
a carven jar. She told how she bought the boy in the market of an Asian
city, and had him carried to her house in the grove of fig-trees. "Then,"
she went on, "he was l