only after days of the hardest struggle, the cruellest suspense, that
the thought flashed on me that the idea of Hermes leading away the dead
female might, in this case, have been carried one step farther; that
the male figure might be no living man, no man at all, but _Hermes
himself_ actually banqueting in Hades with the soul of his disembodied
_protégée_! The thought filled me with a rapture I cannot describe, and
you witnessed my excitement. But, at all events, I saw that this was a
truly tremendous departure from Greek art and thought, to which in
general the copyists seemed to cling so religiously. There must
therefore be a reason, a strong reason, for vandalism such as this. And
that, at any rate, it was no longer difficult to discover; for now I
knew that the male figure was no mortal, but a god, a spirit, a DAEMON
(in the Greek sense of the word); and the female figure I saw by the
marked shortness of her drapery to be no Athenian, but a Spartan; no
matron either, but a maiden, a lass, a LASSIE; and now I had forced on
me lassie daemon, _Lacedaemon._

'This then was the badge, the so carefully-buried badge, of this
society of men. The only thing which still puzzled and confounded me at
this stage was the startling circumstance that a _Greek_ society should
make use of a _Latin_ motto. It was clear that either all my
conclusions were totally wrong, or else the motto _mens sana in corpore
sano_ contained wrapped up in itself some acroamatic meaning which I
found myself unable to penetrate, and which the authors had found no
Greek motto capable of conveying. But at any rate, having found this
much, my knowledge led me of itself one step further; for I perceived
that, widely extended as were their operations, the society was
necessarily in the main an _English,_ or at least an English-speaking
one--for of this the word "lassie" was plainly indicative: it was easy
now to conjecture London, the monster-city in which all things lose