“Clio, Clio,” said Euterpe quickly, “can’t you see that Erato is ill? Please go on quickly, and let Calliope tell her story. When that is finished, Erato will be all right again. She has been worrying herself.” It was not often that Euterpe said so much, and so authoritatively. Her eyes were bright: almost there were tears in them. “I should be glad to recite to you,” said Calliope, “a poem in thirty-five cantos, with two thousand stanzas to the canto, heroic metre, classical subject----” “Swivel-action and no escapement,” Thalia went on, under her breath. “I am afraid,” said Clio, “that we shall not have time for all that, much as we should like to.” “Oh, quite so,” added Terpsichore, a little maliciously. “If you would read us the synopsis now,” suggested Clio. “Or the index,” said Thalia. “Or even the advertisements at the end,” Terpsichore proposed. “I will read you no poem whatever,” said Calliope severely. “_You are not--not yet ripe for it._” “Yes, we are very crude,” sighed Thalia to Terpsichore. “I will tell you instead a perfectly true story, quite unadorned and not at all epic. When you get a little riper, I will read you one of my own poems, but not to-night. To-night you have to put up with the following drivel.” This is the drivel which they had to put up with:-- * * * * * There was once a man, an Athenian, who was the opposite of all that he wanted to be. The gods had made him for a joke, and a very good joke he was; but as a man he was a failure. To start with, he desired to have a perfect body and then to despise it. He wanted to be beautiful, and strong, and think nothing of it. Yet he thought a good deal of the bent piece of ugliness which was the nearest he could do to a perfect body. For he had nothing he wanted, and could do nothing he wanted. Sometimes he made good resolutions and tried to lead a fine life; then the gods dug one another in the ribs, and rolled about Olympus gasping with laughter. They knew very well that they had taken unusual pains about that man’s physical composition; they had afflicted him with several hereditary taints; they knew that he might make enough good resolutions to pave the whole of--well, Westminster Abbey, and that it was a physical impossibility that he should keep any of them. “Let this man,” one of the gods had said to Zeus, shortly before the failure was born, “be cowardly, sensual, and brutal.” Then Zeus said that he was tired of making that sort. “Oh,” the other god urged, “but we’ll give him at the same time the emotions and aspirations of a noble mind. Then we shall see soul and body fighting, and the soul will get thrashed every time.” “Now, that _is_ something like sport,” Zeus had remarked, as he gave the necessary order.