Althea's presence reminded him of Tennis, Ledscha, and Nemesis, who for
so long a time seemed to have suspended her persecution, but since he had
returned from the abode of the oracle was again asserting the old right
to him. During many a sleepless hour of the night he had once more heard
the rolling of her terrible wheel.

Even before the journey to the oasis of Amon, everything life could offer
him, the idle rake, in his perpetual darkness, had seemed shallow and
scarcely worth stretching out his hand for it.

True, an interesting conversation still had power to charm him, but often
during its continuance the full consciousness of his misfortune forced
itself upon his mind; for the majority of the subjects discussed by the
artists came to them through the medium of sight, and referred to new
creations of architecture, sculpture, and painting, from whose enjoyment
his blindness debarred him.

When returning home from a banquet, if his way lay through the city, he
was reminded of the superb buildings, marble terraces and fountains,
statues and porticoes, which had formerly satiated his eyes with delight,
and must now be illumined with a brilliant radiance by the morning
sunbeams, though a hostile fate shut them out from his eyes, starving and
thirsting for beautiful forms.

But it had seemed to him still harder to bear that his blinded eyes
refused to show him the most beautiful of all beautiful things, the human
form, when he lingered among the Ephebi or the spectators of a festal
procession, or visited the gymnasium, the theatre, the Aphrodisium, or
the Paneum gardens, where the beautiful women met at sunset.