He had been living his days in the midst of the true Olympians, and he had not known it. Well might they torment him in spirit and body. He was nought but the weakest of charlatans, who sought to dissemble the poverty of his nature with dreams of the life he was too puny to embrace. But this ignoble self-deception had been only too clear to others. From the first, those whom he called “street-persons” had seen him for what he was. And they had not failed to requite him with every indignity. Yet surely there was irony in the decree that withheld from him the true facts of the existence of which he was born to partake. He, the tired wayfarer who had strayed from Olympus, had conceived that on a day, after a sojourn upon the dark, inhospitable earth, he would be permitted to return to his immortal peers and companions. But how strangely had he deceived himself! He was no Olympian; he had no right to consort with the heroes and gods. For he was dwelling in Olympus now; the persons who thronged the streets of the great city were those shining ones of whom he constantly dreamed. And in their transcendent greatness they made a jest of their condition. And they amused themselves by tormenting this impostor who presumed to ruffle it among them: by perverting his ears, that their noble speech should appear uncouth; by perverting his eyes, that their sacred exercises should seem meaningless; by perverting his taste, so that it came to loathe the choice foods by which they were sustained! “O my father,” he cried as he staggered into the little room with his throbbing brain, “I pray you show me that passage in the Book of the Ages in which the deluded earth-mortal, having presumed to consider himself of the kin of the gods, is borne to Olympus secretly, without his own knowledge; and its inhabitants, in order to mock him, force him to believe he is still on the earth.” His father regarded him with a wistful patience. “O why did you call me Achilles, my father? Why did you permit me to call myself by that proud name?” cried the young man. “I am one of other stature. I have deluded myself miserably; I am the sport of those with whom I would claim kin.” “We are neither less nor more, O Achilles, than we deem ourselves to be,” said the white-haired man, peering towards the distressed wayfarer with an ineffable compassion in his eyes.