Ancient Manners

Publisher Marketing: Excerpt: ...tears. I have other than women at the palace; I have sturdy Ethiopians with chests of bronze and arms bulging out with muscles. In their embrace, I shall soon forget your womanish legs and your pretty beard. The spectacle of their passion will doubtless be a new one for me, and I shall give my amorousness a rest. But the day I am certain that your eyes have ceased to trouble me by their absence, and that I can replace your mouth, then I shall despatch you from the top of the bridge of Hermes to join my necklace and my rings like a jewel I have worn too long. Ah! what it is to be a queen!" She sat up and seemed as if waiting. But Demetrios remained impassive, and did not move a muscle, as if he had not heard her. She resumed angrily: "You have not understood?" He leaned carelessly upon his elbow and said quietly and unmovedly: "I have thought of a tale. "Long ago, long before the conquest of Thrace by your father's ancestors, it was inhabited by wild beasts and a few timorous men. "The animals were very beautiful: there were lions tawny as the sun, tigers striped like the evening, and bears black as night. "The men were little and flat-nosed, covered with old, worn skins, armed with rude lances and bows without beauty. They shut themselves up in mountain holes, behind huge stones which they moved with difficulty. They passed their lives at the chase. There was blood in the forests. "The country was so forlorn that the gods had deserted it. When Artemis left Olympus in the whiteness of the morning, she never took the path which would have led her to the North. The wars which were waged there did not disturb Ares. The absence of pipes and flutes repelled Apollo. The triple Hecate alone shone in solitude, like the face of a Medusa upon a petrified land. "Now, there came to live in that country a man of more favoured race, one who did not dress in skin like the mountain savages. "He wore a long white robe which trailed behind him a little. He loved to...