words that he was to be discreet and to pick out the very choicest
flowers, and then betook himself into the hall of the Muses to seek
Pollux. From him he had learnt where to find the suffering Selene, of
whom he could not help thinking incessantly and wherever he might be. He
did not find the sculptor in his screened-off nook; prompted by a wish
to speak to his mother, Pollux had gone down to the gatehouse where
he was now standing before her and frankly narrating, with many eager
gestures of his long arms, all that had occurred on the previous night.
His story flowed on like a song of triumph, and when he described how
the holiday procession had carried away Arsinoe and himself, the old
woman jumped up from her chair and clapping her fat little hands, she
exclaimed:

"Ah! that is pleasure, that is happiness! I remember flying along with
your father in just the same way thirty years ago."

"And since thirty years," Pollux interposed. "I can still 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 fu