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‘Vain. Empty. Transitory,’ the voice within her repeated. But just as she was about to finish the day with the comprehensive summary that she had nothing to lend to life and no place to fill, her eyes fell upon Pamphilus. It was his custom, through lack of self-confidence, to take the last seat at the remote end of the room. The guests acknowledged his preëminence among them, but when one evening they had wished to elect him King of the Banquet he had furtively and savagely intimated to them his refusal and the votes had passed to another. But Chrysis’s eyes had often, as now, rested upon that head bent forward to receive her every word and that received each one with so earnest a frown.
    ‘That is something!’ she said to herself suddenly and for a moment her heart stopped beating.
    She had intended to recite to them The Clouds of Aristophanes that evening, but she now changed her mind. She felt the need to nourish her heart and those watchful eyes with something lofty and deeply felt. Perhaps what she called the ‘lofty’ was in this world merely a beautiful form of falsehood, cheating the heart. But she would try again tonight and see whether, after so dejected a day, it woke any stir of conviction. ‘What shall I read?’ she asked herself as the tables were being removed. ‘Something from Homer? – Priam begging of Achilles the body of Hector? No. . . . No. . . . Nor would they understand the Oedipus at Colonus. The Alcestis? The Alcestis?’
    One of the shyer guests, seeing her deliberating over the choice of the evening’s declamation, timidly asked her to read the Phaedrus of Plato.
    ‘Oh, my friend,’ she said, ‘I have not seen the book for several years. I should be obliged to improvise long stretches in it. . . .’
    ‘Could you . . . could you read the opening and the close?’
    ‘I shall try it for you,’ she replied and rising slowly disposed the folds of her robe about her. The servants withdrew and silence fell upon the company. This was the moment (on happier evenings) that she loved; this hush, this eagerness, this faintly mocking affection. What drives them – she would ask herself – in the next fifteen years to become so graceless . . . so pompous, or envious, or so busily cheerful?
    At first all went well. The boys listened with delight to the account of how other young men gathered in the streets and palaestra of Athens to hear the arguments of Socrates. Listening, they agreed that nothing in the world was more to be prized than a beautifully ordered speech. Then followed the description of the walk that Socrates and Phaedrus took into the country. ‘This is indeed a rare resting-place. This plane-tree is not only tall, but thick and spreading. And this agnus castus is at the very moment of flowering and its shade and its fragrance will render our stay the more agreeable. These images and these votive-offerings tell us that the place is surely sacred to some nymphs and to some river-god. . . . Truly, Phaedrus, you are an admirable guide.’
    From there she passed to the close:
    ‘But let us go now, as the heat of the day is over.
    ‘Socrates: Would it not be well before we go to offer up a prayer to the gods of this place?
    ‘Phaedrus: It would, Socrates.
    ‘Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant that I may become beautiful in the inner man and may whatever I possess without be in harmony with that which is within. May I esteem the wise men alone to be rich. And may my store of gold be such as none but the good may bear. Phaedrus, need we say anything more? As for myself I have prayed enough.
    ‘Phaedrus: And let the same prayer serve for me, for these are the things friends share with one another .’
    All went well until this phrase. Then Chrysis, the serene, the happily dead, seeing the tears that stood in the eyes of Pamphilus, could go no further, and before them all she wept as one weeps who after an absence of folly and self-will