Demetrios looked at her, and divined, unerringly, the artless, novel sensuality with which this young girl’s body was animated. He said, “I am the first to worship it,” and he took her in his arms. The queen was not angry at this brusquerie, but stepped back a pace and asked, “You think yourself Adonis, that you dare to lay hands on the goddess?” He answered, “Yes.” She looked at him, smiled a little, and concluded. “You are right.” Thus was why he became insupportable, and his best friends left him; but he ravished the hearts of all women. When he entered one of the apartments of the palace, the women of the court ceased talking, and the other women listened to him too, for the sound of his voice was an ecstasy. If he took refuge with the queen, their persecution followed him even there, under pretexts ever new. Did he wander through the streets, the folds of his tunic became filled with little papyri on which the women wrote their names with words of anguish. But he crumpled them up without reading them. He was tired of all that. When his handiwork was set up in the temple of Aphrodite, the sacred enclosure was invaded at every hour of the night by the crowd of his feminine adorers, who came to read his name chiselled in the stone and offer a wealth of doves and roses to their living god. His house was soon encumbered with gifts, which he accepted at first out of negligence, but ended by refusing all, when he understood what was desired of him, and that he was being treated like a prostitute. His very slave-women offered themselves. He had them whipped, and sold them to the little porneion at Rhacotis. Then his men-slaves, seduced by presents, opened his door to unknown women whom he found at his bed-side when he came home, and whose attitude left no doubt as to their passionate intentions. The trinkets of his toilet-table disappeared one after the other; more than one of the women of the town had a sandal or a belt of his, a cup from which he had drunk, even the stones of the fruit he had eaten. If he dropped a flower as he walked, he did not find it again. The women would have picked up the very dust upon which his shoes had trampled.