as it advanced, sending out offshoots to right and left, and broadening
to a pool of brilliant red. There were strange lives into which he looked
that were like the block of marble; women with grave sweet faces told him
the astounding tale of their adventures, and how, they said, they had met
the faun when they were little children. They told him how they had
played and watched by the vines and the fountains, and dallied with the
nymphs, and gazed at images reflected in the water pools, till the
authentic face appeared from the wood. He heard others tell how they had
loved the satyrs for many years before they knew their race; and there
were strange stories of those who had longed to speak but knew not the
word of the enigma, and searched in all strange paths and ways before
they found it.

He heard the history of the woman who fell in love with her slave-boy,
and tempted him for three years in vain. He heard the tale from the
woman's full red lips, and watched her face, full of the ineffable
sadness of lust, as she described her curious stratagems in mellow
phrases. She was drinking a sweet yellow wine from a gold cup as she
spoke, and the odor in her hair and the aroma of the precious wine seemed
to mingle with the soft strange words that flowed like an unguent from
a carven jar. She told how she bought the boy in the market of an Asian
city, and had him carried to her house in the grove of fig-trees. "Then,"
she went on, "he was led into my presence as I sat between the columns of
my court. A blue veil was spread above to shut out the heat of the sun,
and rather twilight than light shone on the painted walls, and the
wonderful colours of the pavement, and the images of Love and the Mother
of Love. The men who brought the boy gave him over to my girls, who
undressed him before me, one drawing gently away his robe, another
stroking his brown and flowing hair, another praising the whiteness of
his limbs, and another caressing him, and speaking loving words in his