Balbus clapped his hands to accentuate the broken time, and we all joined him; Neaera, stimulated by a murmur of applause, gave a significance to her movements; danced up to Ariston, then flinging her hands out at him in mock aversion, danced away again; next reversing her step danced back to him, and, snatching the flower out of his chiton, tripped triumphantly off, throwing her head up in elation; and to increase Ariston's spite she made as though she would give it to Balbus; but upon his holding out his hand for it, danced away from him, and after raising hopes in others of our group by tentative movements in one direction and another, finally fixed her bright eyes on me, danced hither and thither as though uncertain, and then finally brought it to me, and daintily pressing it to her lips, put it with both hands and a pretty air of resolution into mine. CHAPTER VII A TRAGIC DENOUEMENT Lydia could not disembarrass herself of the feeling of guilt with which she awoke after her interview with Iréné. She went to the temple for help and knelt before the story of Demeter's sorrows, which was told in sweeping frescoes on its walls. Chance so happened that she found herself before that part of the story which described the goddess forgetting her own sorrow in her devotion to the sick child of the woodman in his hut. The artist, in the reaction from the Greek method of treating this story which marked the narrative of Ovid as contrasted with that of Homer, had dwelt upon the humble conditions of the poor hut in which the light of Demeter's golden hair shone like a beneficent aureole; and the nascent maternal instinct in Lydia vibrated to the beauty of Demeter's task. Was she to renounce this highest standard of maternity? What though she did love Chairo, was it not this very love which the goddess bade her renounce? And was not the greater the love the nobler the sacrifice? She returned to the cloister weary with the struggle and strove to forget it by devoting herself to the duties of the hospital. As she cared for a sick child there, the fresco in the temple before which she had that morning kneeled came back to her, and in the memory of that hour and in the love that went out to the child she was nursing she found consolation. But perhaps she was most influenced by a certain capacity for passive resistance in her, which unconsciously set her upon opposing the inclination to yield, whether to her love for Chairo or to the pleading of the priest. She could refuse to yield to both more easily than decide to yield to either. And so, many days passed in the valley of indecision before she was lifted out of it by an unexpected event.