Their great Earth Mother, blond and sunny as her golden grain, the deity of all fruitfulness and beneficent increase, is also Ceres Deserta—the Mater Dolorosa—shrouded in the dark blue robe of all earth’s shadows, haggard with tears of wasting desolation—“the type of divine sorrow,” as well as of joyous fruition ... her emblem the blood-red poppy, symbol in its drowsy juices, of sleep and death, as in its multitudinous seeds the symbol of life and resurrection. And her daughter, like herself the most specially and intimately beloved by the Greeks among all their deities, had even more the dual quality—Goddess of Spring, of resurrection, and rejuvenescence, and yet too, Queen of the dark Under World. She was the impulse of all spring’s teeming life, and yet herself “compact of sleep and death and narcotic flowers bearing 195always in the swallowed pomegranate seeds the secret of ultimate decay, of return to the grave.” Korè, the maiden, the incarnation of all fresh and sweet and innocent joyousness, was also symbol of its evanescence—“a helpless plucked flower in the arms of Aidoneus,” so that upon the sarcophagi of women who had died in early youth the Greeks were wont to carve Pluto’s stealing of Persephone, picturing the Divine Maiden with the likeness of the dear dead one’s face. Dark, blurred shapes in Greek-like drapery of many-folded cape and shawl, appeared now and then in shifting crowds upon station platforms, like the uneasy shades of Pluto’s kingdom seeking escape. To Peripatetica and Jane it began to seem as if their quest for the Lost Spring had taken them into the Under World of her imprisonment to behold with thrills of half pity, half awe, in “that dim land where all things are forgotten” her transformation into the mate of gloomy Dis, no longer bright, golden-haired girl-flower, but veiled Proserpina Despœna, the Queen of the Dead, where now: “Pale, beyond porch and portal, Crowned with calm leaves, she stands, Who gathers all things mortal With cold immortal hands; She waits for each and other, She waits for all men born, Forgets the Earth, her mother, The life of fruits and corn.” Escaping at last from the sulphur fumes, the strange 196glares and the Hades visions, they found themselves standing under a clear star-strewn sky with a gentle air blowing in their faces. In an open carriage they were whirled off, they knew not where, into the night, stars bright overhead and lights like fallen stars on a high hill to the right, the soft wind of the darkness breathing of spring and green growing things. Suddenly there was the welcoming door of the Hotel des Temples, and then little white bedrooms and quick oblivion. There is a pounding on Jane’s door.