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"Yes; let the dancing girls come!" cried Euphobias rousing from his stupor. "I want to see how this honorable people disturbs its digestion, which is the best gift to man, by the lewd steps of the daughters of Hercules." Sónnica made a sign to her steward, and in a moment the joyous sound of flutes was heard in the peristyle. "The auletai!" shouted the guests.
Before the slave entered, the guests turned in alarm toward the farther end of the table. A beast-like growling arose from beneath it. Euphobias had fallen from his couch, and with his head on the mosaic was disgorging his dinner, accompanied by a stream of wine. "Give him laurel leaves!" called the prudent Alcon. "There is nothing better to dissipate drunkenness."
By this time Euphobias was talking to empty space. They had all left, and had mingled with the moving crowd on the street. Only Actæon remained, examining him with interest, as if marveling at finding in a far-away city a man so like those who in Athens swarmed about the Academy, forming a class of hungry and obscure philosophic plebs.
The slaves compelled him almost by force to chew the leaves, paying no attention to the philosopher's protests. "I am not drunk," shouted Euphobias. "It is the hunger which persecutes me. Most of the time I can find no bread, and when I am so fortunate as to sit at a table like Sónnica's, the food which I eat escapes me."
The guests, red with emotion, their eyes sparkling and their mouths dry, had rushed into the centre of the triclinium, interrupting the dance, mixing with the couples and grasping them. Euphobias lay snoring at the foot of his couch. Sónnica had disappeared long before, leaving the triclinium, supported by a slave without lifting her head from Actæon's shoulder.
Euphobias, indifferent to the charms of the dancing girls, looked at him with amazement, wondering to what sex belonged those skeleton arms peeping from beneath the veils, painted white, and weighted down with jewels. "Brother, are you a man or a woman?" the philosopher gravely enquired.
Mopsus then invited him to his house to meet his sons and to dine; but the Athenian was obliged to plead his previous invitation to Sónnica's banquet. When the archer had left, Actæon felt the torment of thirst, and, remembering the philosopher's recommendations, he entered the establishment of the Roman whose Lauronian wine inspired so much enthusiasm in Euphobias.
Sónnica gathered her tunic around her waist in order to run with greater freedom, leaving disclosed the resplendent whiteness of her limbs. "We are going to die, Euphobias," she said to the philosopher, who stood absorbed in contemplation before this spectacle of destruction. For the first time the philosopher failed to display his insolent and ironic manner.
They walked with airy ease, as if gliding over the mosaic to the sound of invisible flutes, and with their delicate girlish hands they crowned the guests with flowers. Suddenly the steward appeared with an irritated countenance. "Mistress, Euphobias the parasite is trying to enter." The guests burst into cries and protests on hearing this. "Throw him out, Sónnica!
She was ever thinking of Athens the luminous, the city which held so many memories, and many of whose customs she sought to revive. Euphobias the philosopher, as he reached this point in his story, stoutly declared that Sónnica's life in Saguntum was above reproach, in spite of what the Greek women of the district of the merchants said.
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