play Aphrodite as she does, and ride off in a shell borne aloft on
emerald-green glass to look as if it were floating on the waves; if
dolphins set with pearls and turquoises served us for a footstool, and
white ostrich-plumes floated over our heads, like the silvery clouds that
float over Athens in the sky of a fine spring day. The transparent
tissue that she dared not put on would well become me! If only that were
true which Zoe was reading yesterday, that the souls of men were destined
to visit the earth again and again in new forms! Then perhaps mine might
some day come into the world in that of a king's child. I should not
care to be a prince, so much is expected of him, but a princess indeed!
That would be lovely!"

These and such like were Thais' dreams, while Zoe stood outside the tent
of the royal children with her cousin, the chief-attendant of prince
Philopator, carrying on an eager conversation in a low tone. The child's
nurse from time to time dried her eyes and sobbed bitterly as she said:
"My own baby, my other children, my husband and our beautiful house in
Alexandria--I left them all to suckle and rear a prince. I have
sacrificed happiness, freedom, and my nights'-sleep for the sake of the
queen and of this child, and how am I repaid for all this? As if I were
a lowborn wench instead of the daughter and wife of noble men; this
woman, half a child still, scarcely yet nineteen, dismisses me from her
service before you and all her ladies every ten days! And why? Because
the ungoverned blood of her race flows in her son's veins, and because he
does not rush into the arms of a mother who for days does not ask for him
at all, and never troubles herself about him but in some idle moment when
she has gratified every other whim. Princes distribute favor or disgrace
with justice only so long as they are children. The little one
understands very well what I am to him, and sees what Cleopatra is.
If I could find it in my heart to ill-use him in secret, this mother--who