and did not even end when Dido was left alone upon the shores of
Carthage.

"I don't understand it at all," he said one day with a wrinkled brow,
"how a man of the caliber of Ulysses could stay so long the prisoner
of Calypso, a woman, when he wanted to go home. It's a pretty shabby
business for a hero and a demigod. A woman!" he sneered, "I'd like to
see any woman keep me sitting in a cave if I wanted to go anywhere!"

His braggadicio was the full-colored boyish reflection of the Canby
point of view. I had merely shrugged woman out of existence. Now Jerry
castigated her.

"What could she do?" he went on scornfully. "She couldn't shoot or run
or fight. All she did was to lie around or strut about with a veil
around her head and a golden girdle (sensible costume!) and serve the
hero with ambrosia and ruddy nectar. I've never eaten ambrosia, but
I'm pretty sure it was some sweet, sticky stuff, like _her_." There is
no measure for the contempt of his accents.

"She could swim," I ventured timidly.

"Swim! Even a fish can swim!"

I don't know why, but at this conversation, the first of Jerry's
maturer years in which the topic had been woman, I felt a slight
tremor go over me. Jerry was too good to look at. I fancied that there
were many women who would have liked to see the flash of his eye at
that moment and to meet his challenge with their wily arts. In the
pride of his masculine strength and capacity he scorned them as I had