em a week's training.
So that may pass. Now for some lighter species of representation to
follow--something more or less dramatic.'

'You forget that you speak to one who trusts to be, as soon as she has
the power, the high-priestess of Athene, and who in the meanwhile is
bound to obey her tutor Julian's commands to the priests of his day, and
imitate the Galilaeans as much in their abhorrence for the theatre as
she hopes hereafter to do in their care for the widow and the stranger.'

'Far be it from me to impugn that great man's wisdom. But allow me to
remark, that to judge by the present state of the empire, one has a
right to say that he failed.'

'The Sun-God whom he loved took him to himself, too early, by a hero's
death.'

'And the moment he was removed, the wave of Christian barbarism rolled
back again into its old channel.'

'Ah! had he but lived twenty years longer!'

'The Sun-God, perhaps, was not so solicitous as we are for the success
of his high-priest's project.'

Hypatia reddened--was Orestes, after all laughing in his sleeve at her
and her hopes?

'Do not blaspheme!' she said solemnly.

'Heaven forbid! I only offer one possible explanation of a plain fact.
The other is, that as Julian was not going quite the right way to work
to restore the worship of the Olympians, the Sun-God found it expedient
to withdraw him from his post, and now sends in his place Hypatia the
philosopher, who will be wise enough to avoid Julian's error, and not
copy the Galilaeans too closely, by imitating a severity of morals at
which they are the only true and natural adepts.'

'So Julian's error was that of being too virtuous? If it be so, let
me copy him, and fail like him. The fault will then not be mine, but
fate's.'

'Not in being too virtuous himself, most stainless likeness of Athene,
but in trying to make others so. He forgot one half of Juvenal's great
dictum about "Panem and Circenses," as the absolute and overruling
necessities of rulers. He tried to give the people the bread without the
games.... And what thanks he received for his enormous munificence,
let himself and the good folks of Antioch tell--you just quoted his
Misopogon--'

'Ay-the lament of a man too pure for his age.'

'Exactly so. He should rather have been content to keep his purity
to himself, and have gone to Antioch not merely as a philosophic
high-priest, with a beard of questionable cleanliness, to offer
sacrifices to a god in whom