She thought that she indeed had cause to be contented. She had gained the bravest, cleverest, most splendid of all the Greeks. Even his gallantries, of which her women told her, could not lessen the admiration that she felt, and all these gallantries, excusable in him till now, she knew he would abandon for the love of her. Had she not cause to be contented? And he, as the epithalamium he had written for her was sung outside their chamber door by girls and boys, to the music of the harps and flutes—he, tired with the day’s excitement, as he laid him down by her, he too was happy, while Timandra—poor Timandra!—was almost forgot. Lonely Timandra, who had given up all else for him, and loved him as only such a one as she can love, in her fair Grecian villa—far from the bustle of the town, she sat her down in dark despair and rage. The very luxury with which he had surrounded her grew hateful to her. The garden perfumes from the orange-trees, whose blossoms the late autumn winds had not yet shaken off, grew sickly. The shaded seats, where they had sat on summer nights, looked drear. The birds, which had so often sung to them in the bright springtime, on quiet cloudless evenings, their songs of love and endless happiness, were still. All, all, was desolate. She had sometimes feared this end. And yet what fault was it of hers that she was not descended from as long a line of ancestors as this Hippareté? Was her rival any better for her trip to Samos, and all the other childish myths about her family? Perhaps her own forefathers—who could tell?—had been as great as that one’s. Her mother—and now she almost wept—her kind, fond, virtuous mother, who had died hardly forgiving her, she, at least, was better than that poor doll’s, with three husbands living at one time. She was more beautiful, she knew, than poor Hippareté, for he had often told her so; and she had wit and learning, and was more skilled in every art than any woman in her time, except, perhaps, Aspasia. So the day passed with her. When the night came on, a maddening frenzy seized her soul, till the chill morning dawned, and then an evil smile crept over her disdainful mouth; she knew her time would come. For a season Alkibiades became another man. He laid aside the flowing Persian robe in which he loved to scandalize the sterner Greeks. The long and curling locks, tokens of youth, were cut at last. His days again were given to military exercise, and sometimes he would even seek out Sokrates, and listen to his teaching. The faithful Sokrates had never ceased to follow him through all his dissipation, had never ceased to love him for his beauty and his understanding, nor ceased to mourn for him as over a great soul departing.