an abstract canon of Aristotle, with which I, who am a Platonist after my mistress's model, do not happen to agree. But do, I beseech you, be ruled, not by me, but by your own wisdom. You cannot bring the people to appreciate your designs at the first sight. You are too wise, too pure, too lofty, too far-sighted for them. And therefore you must get power to compel them. Julian, after all, found it necessary to compel—if he had lived seven years more he would have found it necessary to persecute.'
'The gods forbid that—that such a necessity should ever arise here.'
'The only way to avoid it, believe me, is to allure and to indulge. After all, it is for their good.'
'True,' sighed Hypatia. 'Have your way, sir.'
'Believe me, you shall have yours in turn. I ask you to be ruled by me now, only that you may be in a position to rule me and Africa hereafter.'
'And such an Africa! Well, if they are born low and earthly, they must, I suppose, he treated as such; and the fault of such a necessity is Nature's, and not ours.—Yet it is most degrading!—But still, if the only method by which the philosophic few can assume their rights, as the divinely-appointed rulers of the world, is by indulging those lower beings whom they govern for their good—why, be it so. It is no worse necessity than many another which the servant of the gods must endure in days like these.'
'Ah,' said Orestes, refusing to hear the sigh, or to see the bitterness of the lip which accompanied the speech—'now Hypatia is herself again; and my counsellor, and giver of deep and celestial reasons for all things at which poor I can only snatch and guess by vulpine cunning. So now for our lighter entertainment. What shall it be?'
'What you will, provided it be not, as most such are, unfit for the eyes of modest women. I have no skill in catering for folly.'
'A pantomime, then? We may make that as grand and as significant as we will, and expend too on it all our treasures in the way of gewgaws and wild beasts.'
'As you like.'
'Just consider, too, what a scope for mythologic learning a pantomime affords. Why not have a triumph of some deity? Could I commit