well how at one of the great Dionysiac festivals, fired by the power of
the god, you rushed through the streets with a deer-skin over your
shoulders."

"That was delightful--lovely!" cried Doris with sparkling eyes. "But
thirty years since it was all different, very different. I have told you
before now how I went with our maid-servant into the Canopic way to the
house of my aunt Archidike to look on at the great procession. I had not
far to go for we lived near the Theatre, my father was stage-manager and
yours was one of the chief singers in the chorus. We hurried along, but
all sorts of people stopped us, and drunken men wanted to joke with me."

"Ah, you were as sweet as a rose-bud then," her son interrupted.

"As a rose-bud, yes, but not like your lovely rose," said the old woman.
"At any rate I looked nice enough for the men in disguise--fauns and
satyrs and were the cynic hypocrites in their ragged cloaks, to think it
worth while to look at me and to take a rap on the knuckles when they
tried to put an arm round me or to steal a kiss, I did not care for the
handsomest of them, for Euphorion had done for me with his fiery glances
--not with words for I was very strictly kept and he had never been able
to get a chance to speak to me. At the corner of the Canopic way and the
Market street we could get no farther, for the crowd had blocked the way
and were howling and storming as they stared at a party of Klodones and
other Maenads, who in their sacred fury were tearing a goat to pieces
with their teeth. I shuddered at the spectacle, but I must need stare
with the rest and shout and halloo as they did. My maid, who I held on
to tightly, was seized with the frenzy and dragged me into the middle of
the circle close up to the bleeding sacrifice. Two of the possessed
women sprang upon us, and I felt one clasping me tightly and trying to