and broken. Few people are seen here, now. And I, an old man, a servant of the gods, would spend an hour dreaming of dead days . . .
There was one mortal woman, only, in my life. In this mad age wherein this arid land blooms with a sinister and pulsing growth of women's flesh, certainly the remembrance of one woman only is strange enough. Yet so it was. She was a maiden named Aalea whom I met by chance, lost, upon the river bank, and escorted, without wayward thought, to her father's door. She was the daughter of a merchant and she was very beautiful, slender and sweet.
Often there comes to me the thought that the mission of woman to man is less to comfort than to wound. Many a noble man, greater than I, would gladly live in quiet, with his wife, the years allotted to him. Yet, how often such men have been
