ptly decided in favour of the latter.

His uncle, and probably the ladies also, had expected the contrary.
Their silence showed this plainly enough, and Hermon therefore added
in a tone of explanation that later the villa would perhaps suit his
condition better, but now he thought it would be a mistake to retire
to the quiet which half the city was conspiring to disturb. No one
contradicted him, and he left the women's apartment with a slight
feeling of vexation, which, however, was soon jested away by the gay
friends who sought him.

When he removed to the city house the next day, he had not yet found
time for a serious talk with Daphne. His uncle, who had managed
the estate of Myrtilus, and wished to give Hermon an account of his
inheritance, was refused by the blind artist, who assured him that he
knew Archias had greatly increased rather than diminished his property,
and thanked him sincerely and warmly. In the convenient and spacious
city house the young sculptor very soon thought he had good reason to be
satisfied with his choice.

Most of his friends were busy artists, and what loss of time every visit
to the remote villa would have imposed upon them, what haste he himself
would have been obliged to use to reach home from the bath, where he
often spent many hours, from the wrestling school, from the meetings of
fashionable people in the Paneum gardens, and at sunset by the seashore
on the royal highway in the Brucheium. All these places were very far
from the villa. It would have required whole hours, too, to reach a
famous cookshop in the Canopus, at whose table he liked to assemble
beloved guests or revel with his friends. The theatre, the Odeum, most
of the public buildings, as well as the houses of his best friends,
and especially the beautiful Glycera, were easily reached from his city
home, and, among the temples, that of Demeter, which he often visited to
pray, offer sacrifices, and rejoice in the power of attraction which his
statue of the goddess exerted upon the multitude. It stood at the back
of the cella in a place accessible to the priesthood alone, visible
only through the open doors, upon a pedestal which his fellow-artists
pronounced rather too high. Yet his offer to have it made smaller was
not accepted, because had it been lower the devout supplicants who stood
there to pray could not have raised their eyes to it.

It was not only at the festivals of the dead that he went to the Greek
cemete