death the less bitter! Don't sit there and snap at your beard, if your
philosophy is good for anything! People used to pray to the gods in
trouble, but you philosophers turn the gods into mists or thin air.
You are a man! You are free! Do something! Say something!"

"But what can I do?" groaned Pisander, bursting into tears, and
wishing for the instant Epicureans, Stoics, Eclectics, Peripatetics,
and every other school of learning in the nethermost Hades.

"_Phui!_ Fudge!" cried Arsinoë. "What is life made for then, if a man
who has spent all his days studying it is as good as helpless! Look at
me! Have I not hands, feet, a head, and wits? Am I not as well
informed and naturally capable as three fine ladies out of every four?
Would I not look as handsome as they, if I had a chance to wear their
dresses and jewels? Have I any blemish, any defect, that makes me
cease to be a woman, and become a thing? Bah, master _Pisander!_ I am
only a slave, but I will talk. Why does my blood boil at the fate of
Agias, if it was not meant that it should heat up for some end? And
yet I am as much a piece of property of that woman whom I hate, as
this chair or casket. I have a right to no hope, no ambition, no
desire, no reward. I can only aspire to live without brutal treatment.
That would be a sort of Elysium. If I was brave enough, I would kill
myself, and go to sleep and forget it all. But I am weak and cowardly,
and so--here I am."

Pisander only groaned and went away to his room to turn over his
Aristotle, and wonder why nothing in the "Nicomachean Ethics" or any
other learned treatise contained the least word that made him
contented over the fate of Agias or his own unhappy situation. Arsinoë
and Semiramis, when he went from them, cried, and cried again, in pity