His conversation with these fair, self-possessed ladies was idle and unaffected. The day’s visitors, the probable weather on the morrow, the softness of the grass, the mildness of the night—these were the charming topics. They did not beg him to express his theories in statuary, and they did not give their opinion upon the Achilleus of Scopas. If it befell that they dismissed the lover who had chosen them, and that they thought him handsome and told him so, he was quite at liberty not to believe in their disinterestedness. When freed from the embrace of their religious arms, he mounted the temple steps and fell to an ecstatic contemplation of the statue. Between the slim columns crowned with Ionian volutes, the goddess stood instinct with life upon a pedestal of rose-coloured stone laden with rich votive offerings. She was naked and fully sexed, tinted vaguely and like a woman. In one hand she held her mirror, the handle of which was a priapus, and with the other she adorned her beauty with a pearl necklace of seven strings. A pearl larger than the others, long and silvery, gleamed between her two breasts, like the moon’s crescent between two round clouds. Demetrios contemplated her tenderly, and would fain have believed, like the common people, that they were real sacred pearls, born of the drops of water which had rolled in the shell of Anadyomene. “O divine sister!” he would say. “O flowered one! O transfigured one! You are no longer the little Asiatic woman whom I made your unworthy model. You are her immortal Idea, the terrestrial soul of Astarte, the mother of her race. You shone in her blazing eyes, you burned in her sombre lips, you swooned in her soft hands, you gaped in her great breasts, you strained in entwining legs, long ago, before your birth; and the food which the daughter of a sinner hungers for is your tyrant also, you, a goddess, the mother of gods and men, the joy and anguish of the world. But I have seen you, evolved you, caught you, O marvelous Cytherea! It is not to your image, it is to yourself that I have given your mirror, and yourself that I have covered with pearls, as on the day when you were born of the fiery heaven and the laughing foam of the sea, like the dew-steeped dawn, and escorted with acclamations by blue tritons to the shores of Cyprus.” He had been adoring her after this fashion when he entered the quay, at the hour when the crowd was melting away, and he heard the anguish and tears of the flute-girls’ chant. ill-010 But he had spurned the courtesans of the temple that evening, because a glimpse of a couple beneath the branches had stirred him with disgust and revolted him to the soul. The kindly influence of the night penetrated him little by little. He turned his face of the wind, the wind that had passed over the sea and seemed to carry to Egypt the lingering scent of the sweet-smelling roses of Amathus.