“You! But you are a girl. For you will be the house and children and the loom.” “I hate the house!” cried Theria. “What! The home of your fathers? How can you?” The boy was shocked. “Oh, I don’t mean the home. I mean the house walls that keep me in. Sometimes I want to scream and struggle as though I were tied down hand and foot.” “But nothing ties you down.” “Do you call it nothing to stay all day twisting a miserable thread like this?” Theria spun with her fingers. “When there is so much, oh, so much in the world.” “But do women feel that way?” he asked. “They always seem contented in the house.” “Would you be content?” “By the gods, no.” “But are we not like you, we girls? We are strong—we like to run and breathe the air. Look at my arm, how ugly white. It has never seen the sun.” She flashed out her fair arm—free of its drapery. “That is not ugly,” said the boy gently. “It is! It is! White as a Persian’s!” “No, it is Greek,” maintained the boy. “By the gods, I’d like to see you running brown and free like Artemis in the wood.” “You don’t think I am foolish to want to run and leap.” “No—no—no!” Theria’s eyes widened with delight. “You don’t think me foolish to read my father’s books?” “Books!” Here the boy was puzzled. “Why should you read books? Poems are to sing, not to read.” “Oh, I sing them, too,” laughed Theria. “Far back in the storeroom, when nobody can hear, I sing them. I have to make up the tunes.” “I wish I could hear you; oh, I wish I could hear you.” That any one should care for what she did! No praise could be sweeter, no joy. So absorbed were they both that they did not hear the voices calling through the house, “Sophocles! Sophocles!” until the searchers had entered the open door—that door which should always be closed. “Eleutheria,” came her father’s voice, sterner than she had ever heard it. “The meaning of this! By Hermes, I must know.” The two turned in confusion. “Whatever made you think you could bring a stranger here into the inner court? How long have you been together?” Theria answered none of his questions. She faced him, her eyes black lakes of astonishment. So intense a mood could not break at once. “I have done no wrong,” she asserted. “How can you think I have done wrong?” “But you have. You are almost a woman. You cannot receive my guests.” “_My_ guest he is, this Sophocles,” she answered with frightened face but steady voice. “We have been talking together about Homer and Pindar. Surely that is no harm. Where is our wrong?” A low exclamation came from the corner of the room. Pindar himself was there with Sophocles’s father. The boy spoke, blushing, “I am the one to blame. I came in here to push the swing—not thinking.” “There is no blame,” repeated the girl passionately. “Don’t call it blame.” Had Nikander been an ordinary Greek father, Theria would undoubtedly have received her whipping at this time.