Actæon, on beholding his beautiful protectress in the light of the sun, felt a thrill of desire rush through his body. She wore as her only covering a Grecian chiton, an open tunic, fastened with metal clasps over the shoulders, and secured around the waist by a golden girdle. The arms emerged bare from the white wrapping, and the left side of the tunic, closed from the armpit to the knee by small brooches, half opened at each step, revealing her pearly nudity. The material was so delicate that its transparency displayed the outlines of her rosy body, which seemed to float in a veil of woven foam. "Does my dress astonish you, Actæon?" "No; I admire you. You seem to me Aphrodite surging from the waves. It is a long time since I have seen the women of Athens disclosing their divine beauty. I am corrupted by my travels, through the rude customs of the barbarians." "It may happen so. As Herodotus says, nearly all who are not Greeks consider it opprobrious to appear nude.--If you only knew how scandalized the people of this city were in the beginning at my Athenian customs!--as if there existed anything more beautiful in the world than the human form!--as if the nude were not the supreme beauty! I adore Phryne, astonishing with her nude body the old men of the Areopagus; making the thousands of pilgrims gathered on the Eleusinian strand shout with enthusiasm when they saw her white form surge from among the veils, like the moon from behind the clouds. I believe in the promise of her bosom more than in the power of the gods." "Do you doubt the gods?" asked Actæon, with his fine Athenian smile. "The same as do you and all those from _there_. The gods now serve only as themes for artists, and if they are tolerated in old Homer, it is because he was skilled in celebrating their quarrels in graceful verse. No; I do not believe in them; they are as simple and credulous as children, but I love them because they are sane and beautiful." "In what do you believe, then, Sónnica?" "I do not know--in something mysterious that surrounds us and animates life; I believe in beauty and love." She was silent a moment, standing in a pensive attitude; then she continued: "I hate the barbarians, not because they have no treasures of art, but for the odium they cast on love, which they enchain with all manner of laws and restrictions. They are hypocritical and deformed; they make reproduction a crime, and they hate the nude, hiding the body with all kinds of rags, as if it were an abominable spectacle--when carnal love, the meeting of two bodies, is the sublime love through which we are born, and without which the fount of existence would dry up--extinguishing the world."