tenderness for the elderly hero of her creation as soon as Minerva
has curled his bald old hair for him and tittivated him up all over,
she makes it abundantly plain that she will not look at a single one
of her actual flesh and blood admirers. There is a leading young
gentleman, Telemachus, who is nothing if he is not [Greek], or
canny, well-principled, and discreet; he has an amiable and most
sensible young male friend who says that he does not like crying at
meal times--he will cry in the forenoon on an empty stomach as much
as anyone pleases, but he cannot attend properly to his dinner and
cry at the same time. Well, there is no lady provided either for
this nice young man or for Telemachus. They are left high and dry
as bachelors. Two goddesses indeed, Circe and Calypso, do one after
the other take possession of Ulysses, but the way in which he
accepts a situation which after all was none of his seeking, and
which it is plain he does not care two straws about, is, I believe,
dictated solely by a desire to exhibit the easy infidelity of
Ulysses himself in contrast with the unswerving constancy and
fidelity of his wife Penelope. Throughout the Odyssey the men do
not really care for women, nor the women for men; they have to
pretend to do so now and again, but it is a got-up thing, and the
general attitude of the sexes towards one another is very much that
of Helen, who says that her husband Menelaus is really not deficient
in person or understanding: or again of Penelope herself, who, on
being asked by Ulysses on his return what she thought of him, said
that she did not think very much of him nor very little of him; in
fact, she did not think much about him one way or the other. True,
later on she relents and becomes more effusive; in fact, when she
and Ulysses sat up talking in bed and Ulysses told her the story of
his adventures, she never went to sleep once. Ulysses never had to
nudge her with his elbow and say, "Come, wake up, Penelope, you are