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Eurybia was maintaining that what had happened was the overthrow of the Olympians by the Titans while Echidna was arguing that what was convulsing time and rocking space, and upheaving the Abyss till it was tilted as high as the Zodiacal Signs, was nothing more or less than the victory of the Eternal Feminine whether divine or human or diabolic or angelic or bestial or saurian or reptilian or earthly or aquatic or ethereal or fiery, over the male.
    Then Heirax whistled: “Take me to Nisos or leave me to die in Arima!” Ever since she had heard the Hawk’s astounding news an absolute change had approached Arsinöe’s tragic face. It had not taken possession of it. It had only come near it. But it had come so near it that from now on to the end of her days at uneven intervals and for uncertain reasons there began to burst forth or rend forth or tear forth, or jet forth, or explode forth, a flame of exultation so formidable that anyone might have imagined that some fiery particle of the lost lightning of Zeus had by some mad chance got entangled in her hair giving to this already dangerous emotion of hers a supernatural power.
    “And now I beseech you,” Heirax implored her, opening and shutting his beak with a queer, shrill, scraping sound, “take me to …” But it was out of a dead throat that the name “Nisos” dissolved in the air; for without a word the girl had wrung the bird’s neck.
    But Heirax did have, for all his sudden end, a sort of tributary memorial set up in the scoriac floor of the Trojan girl’s memory; for whenever afterwards she recalled her exultation at the image of Zeus robbed of his aerial weapons and compelled to look down from one of those peaks in Ida, so officially familiar to him as the divine Umpire, and to hear news therefrom, without the power to interfere, of the rising of a new Troy on those Seven Italian Hills, she always felt herself lightly toying, as in her heart she derided the Fathers of Gods and Men, with the swaying neck and dangling head of that small enemy of Ilium, so limp in her hands.
    But she didn’t toss that lump of blood-wet feathers either into Eurybia’s swamp or Echidna’s slaughter-cave. She carried it back to the feet of her tree-carved image of Hector and there as she curled it up, claws against beak and wings against belly, she murmured to it aloud: “I don’t fancy the worms of Arima will bother with you :but you’ll be eaten for all that! In this little matter, the friends of great Hector and the enemies of great Hector are the same. Eaten of worms are we all when we come to it: but at least we give birth to our own worms and are devoured by what we ourselves have engendered.” It may have been that some dim little-girl memory of the funeral-rites of the man whose horse-hair-crest above the armour of Achilles seemed just then to stir in reciprocity, came into her mind at that moment; for as she stared at the bird on the ground and thought of the Son of Kronos on his Thunderless peak her triumphant mood relaxed a little. At any rate it relaxed enough to enable her to hear a thin little reedy voice like an infant’s pipe played in a subterranean gallery.
    “Aren’t you ashamed,” piped that thin voice, “to talk so loud that a person can’t hear Echidna’s answer to Eurybia? Is it nothing to you what has caused this terrible Pandemonium that is shaking the bowels of the universe, cracking the kernel of the cosmos, splitting the fundament of the crustaceous globe and disturbing every civilized and scholarly and sophisticated and weaponless worm who dwells below the vulgar and brutal surface of this blood-stained and desecrated earth?”
    As Trojan maids, whether young or old, were addicted to become when crossed in any personal quest, Arsinöe became rude. “And who may you be?” she enquired.
    “I happen to be,” replied the unruffled worm, “what below the surface of the earth we call a philosopher. I pursue the purpose of all true