mad and noisy and bright—­Maenades, Thyades, satyrs, fauns—­naked, in hides of beasts, ungirded, dishevelled, wreathed and garlanded, dancing, singing, shouting.  The thudding of their hooves shook the ground, and the clash of their timbrels and the rustling of their thyrsi filled the air.  They brandished frontal bones, the dismembered quarters of kids and goats; they struck the bronze cantharus, they tossed the silver obba up aloft.  Down a cleft of rocks and woods they came, trooping to a wide seashore with the red of the sunset behind them.  She saw the evening light on the sleek and dappled hides, the gilded ivory and rich brown of their legs and shoulders, the white of inner arms held up on high, their wide red mouths, the quivering of the twin flesh-gouts on the necks of the leaping fauns.  And, shutting out the glimpse of sky at the head of the deep ravine, the god himself descended, with his car full of drunken girls who slept with the serpents coiled about them.

Shouting and moaning and frenzied, leaping upon one another with libidinous laughter and beating one another with the half-stripped thyrsi, they poured down to the yellow sands and the anemonied pools of the shore.  They raced to the water, that gleamed pale as nacre in the deepening twilight in the eye of the evening star.  They ran along its edge over their images in the wet sands, calling their lost companion.

“Hasten, hasten!” they cried; and one of them, a young man with a torso noble as the dawn and shoulder-lines strong as those of the eternal hills, ran here and there calling her name.

“Louder, louder!” she called back in an ecstasy.

Something dropped and tinkled against the fender.  It was one of her hairpins.  One side of her hair was in a loose tumble; she threw up the small head on the superb thick neck.

“Louder!—­I cannot hear!  Once more—­”

The throwing up of her head that had brought down the rest of her hair had given her a glimpse of herself in the glass over the mantelpiece.  For the last time that formidable “Beware!” sounded like thunder in her ears; the next moment she had snapped with her fingers the ribbon that was cutting into her throbbing throat.  He with the torso and those shoulders was seeking her ... how should he know her in that dreary garret, in those joyless habiliments?  He would as soon known his Own in that crimson-bodiced, wire-framed dummy by the window yonder!...

Her fingers clutched at the tawdry mercerised silk of her blouse.  There was a rip, and her arms and throat were free.  She panted as she tugged at something that gave with a short “click-click,” as of steel fastenings; something fell against the fender....  These also....  She tore at them, and kicked them as they lay about her feet as leaves lie about the trunk of a tree in autumn....

“Ah!”

And as she stood there, as if within the screen of a spectrum that deepened to the band of red, her eyes fell on the leopard-skin at her feet.  She caught it up, and in doing so saw purple grapes—­purple grapes that issued from the mouth of a paper bag on the table.  With the dappled pelt about her she sprang forward.  The juice spurted through them into the mass of her loosened hair.  Down her body there was a spilth of seeds and pulp.  She cried hoarsely aloud.