At every turn of his argument, Aristophanes is sure of her comprehension. He knows that he need not adapt himself to a feebler mind: "You understand," he says again and again. At length he comes, in his narration, to the end of their feast that night, and tells how, rising from the banquet interrupted by the entrance of Sophocles with tidings of Euripides dead, he had cried to his friends that they must go and see "The Rhodian rosy with Euripides! . . . And here you stand with those warm golden eyes! Maybe, such eyes must strike conviction, turn One's nature bottom-upwards, show the base . . . Anyhow, I have followed happily The impulse, pledged my genius with effect, Since, come to see you, I am shown--myself!" She instantly bids him, as she has honoured him, that he do honour to Euripides. But, seized by perversity, he declares that if she will give him the _Herakles_ tablets (which he has discerned, lying with the other gifts of Euripides), he will prove to her, by this play alone, the "main mistake" of her worshipped Master. She warmly interrupts, reproving him. Their house _is_ the shrine of that genius, and he has entered it, "fresh from his worst infamy"--yet she has withheld the words she longs to speak, she has inclined, nay yearned, to reverence him: "So you but suffer that I see the blaze And not the bolt--the splendid fancy-fling, Not the cold iron malice, the launched lie." If he does _this_, if he shows her "A mere man's hand ignobly clenched against Yon supreme calmness," she will interpose: "Such as you see me! Silk breaks lightning's blow!" But Aristophanes, at that word of "calmness," exclaims vehemently. Death is the great unfairness! Once a man dead, the survivors croak, "Respect him." And so one must--it is the formidable claim, "immunity of faultiness from fault's punishment." That is why _he_, Aristophanes, has always attacked the living; he knew how they would hide their heads, once dead! Euripides had chosen the other way; "men pelted him, but got no pellet back"; and it was not magnanimity but arrogance that prompted him to such silence. Those at whom Aristophanes or he should fling mud were by that alone immortalised--and Euripides, "that calm cold sagacity," knew better than to do them such service. As he speaks thus, Balaustion's "heart burns up within her to her tongue." She exclaims that the baseness of Aristophanes' attack, of his "mud-volleying" at Euripides, consists in the fact that both men had, at bottom, the same ideals; they both extended the limitations of art, both were desirous from their hearts that truth should triumph--yet Aristophanes, thus desiring, poured out his supremacy of power against the very creature who loved all that _he_ loved! And she declares that such shame cuts through all his glory. Comedy is in the dust, laid low by him: "Balaustion pities Aristophanes!"