The City of Delight

"No, it does not follow," Juventius protested in all seriousness,

while the child flashed a look of intense amusement at the athlete.

"But," waving a pair of long white hands, "none should trifle with

music. It is one of the graces of Nature, divine and elemental.

Wherefore, anything short of a perfect production becometh a mockery

and a mockery against divine things is blasphemy. Ergo, the poor

musician is in danger of Hades!"

"The monster is safe, safe!" the girl protested. "He does not sing,

and from what I caught through the crack of the door, the pretty

stranger had better not. My lady, the princess, had a merry time with

my lord, the prince, at breakfast this morning, all about this same

pretty one. So this is why she breakfasts with us--the second table."

Laodice heard this with a sinking heart. This was a strange house in

which to live at no definite status, with a future blank and

inscrutable.

"Is it, then, that you are wary of offending the over-nice exactions

of music, that you do not sing?" the athlete demanded of Juventius.

"Song," replied the singer gravely, "is originally the expression of

the highest exaltation. To sing before the high mark of feeling is

reached is an insincerity."

"Alas, Juventius," the girl was saying, "how much difficulty you lay

up for yourself in determining the limits of art! Teach broadly and

the fulfilment of your laws will not be such a task for the overworked

and irritable gods of art."

"Child!" Juventius cried passionately. "Your ignorance outreaches your

presumption!"

"Fie! Fie!" the athlete put in comfortably. "Let us make a truce, for

I announce to you the opportunity each to have whatever you wish. We

are to have at the proper moment, according to the Jews, a celestial

visitation which will enable us to have what we most desire."

"You announce it!" the girl scoffed indignantly. "I have heard of that

ever since I was born!"

"I, too, have heard it," said Juventius.

"Well," said the unabashed athlete, "the Pharisee that brings

Amaryllis her fruit is so full of it that he gets prophecies mixed

with his prices and the patriarchs with his fruit. He says that there

are those that declare he is already in the city."

"That he has been seen?" Juventius asked, after a little silence.

"No; merely suspected. They say that things go on in the Temple which

seem to show that some resident of their Olympus already inhabits the

air."

"I saw Seraiah to-day," one of the women said in a low voice.

"Silent as ever? Spotless as ever? Mysterious as ever?" the athlete

asked.

The woman who had spoken shook her head at him as if alarmed.

"I can not bear to hear him ridiculed," she said. "Somehow it seems

blasphemous. They say he marks every one who laughs in his hearing."