". . . 'What! thou soundest in my soul To depths below the deepest, reachest good By evil, that makes evil good again, And so allottest to me that I live, And not die--letting die, not thee alone, But all true life that lived in both of us? Look at me once ere thou decree the lot!' * * * * * Therewith her whole soul entered into his, He looked the look back, and Alkestis died." But when she reaches the nether world--"the downward-dwelling people"--she is rejected as a deceiver: "This is not to die," says the Queen of Hades, for her death is a mockery, since it doubles the life of him she has left behind: "'Two souls in one were formidable odds: Admetos must not be himself and thou!' * * * * * And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit, The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look; And lo, Alkestis was alive again." How do our little squabbles--the "Sex-War"--look to us after this? + + + + + When next we meet with Balaustion, in _Aristophanes' Apology_, she is married to her Euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the waters--this time back to Rhodes, from Athens which has fallen. Many things have happened in the meantime, and Balaustion, leaving her adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of Athens, she may free herself from anguish. Euthukles shall write it down for her, and they will go back to the night they heard Euripides was dead: "One year ago, Athenai still herself." Together she and Euthukles had mused, together glorified their poet. Euthukles had met the audience flocking homeward from the theatre, where Aristophanes had that night won the prize which Euripides had so seldom won. They had stopped him to hear news of the other poet's death: "Balaustion's husband, the right man to ask"--but he had refused them all satisfaction, and scornfully rated them for the crown but now awarded. "Appraise no poetry," he had cried: "price cuttlefish!" Balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in Athens, but one work of Aristophanes, the _Lysistrata_; and now, in breathless reminiscent anger, recalls the experience. It had so appalled her, "that bestiality so beyond all brute-beast imagining," that she would never see again a play by him who in the crowned achievement of this evening had drawn himself as Virtue laughingly reproving Vice, and Vice . . . Euripides! Such a piece it was which had "gained the prize that day we heard the death." Yet, musing on that death, her wrath had fallen from her. "I thought, 'How thoroughly death alters things! Where is the wrong now, done our dead and great?'"