The spectacle of his unsuspicious happiness, though at
present a matter of purely physical conditions, awoke a strange sense
of poetry, a kind of artistic sense in her, watching, as her own
long-deferred recreation in life, his delight in the little
delicacies she prepared to his liking--broiled kids' flesh, the red
wine, the mushrooms sought through the early dew--his hunger and
thirst so daintily satisfied, as he sat at table, like the first-born
of King Theseus, with two wax-lights and a fire at dawn or nightfall
dancing to the prattle and laughter, a bright child, never stupidly
weary. At times his very happiness would seem to her like a menace
of misfortune to come. Was there not with herself the curse of that
unsisterly action? and not far from him, the terrible danger of the
father's, the step-mother's jealousy, the mockery of those half-
brothers to come? Ah! how perilous for happiness the sensibilities
which make him so exquisitely happy now! Before they started on
their dreadful visit to the Minotaur, says Plutarch, the women told
their [166] sons many tales and other things to encourage them; and,
even as she had furnished the child betimes with rules for the solace
of bodily pain, so now she would have brought her own sad experience
into service in precepts for the ejection of its festering power out
of any other trouble that might visit him.
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