A QUESTION
CHAPTER I.
THE HOUSE-KEEPER AND THE STEWARD.
"Salt sea-water or oil, it's all the same to you! Haven't I put my lamp
out long ago? Doesn't the fire on the hearth give light enough? Are
your eyes so drowsy that they don't see the dawn shining in upon us more
and more brightly? The olives are not yet pressed, and the old oil is
getting toward the dregs. Besides, you know how much fruit those
abominable thieves have stolen. But sparrows will carry grain into the
barn before you'll try to save your master's property!"
So Semestre, the ancient house-keeper of Lysander of Syracuse, scolded
the two maids, Chloris and Dorippe, who, unheeding the smoking wicks of
their lamps, were wearily turning the hand-mills.
Dorippe, the younger of the two, grasped her disordered black tresses,
over which thousands of rebellious little hairs seemed to weave a veil of
mist, drew from the mass of curls falling on her neck a bronze arrow,
with which she extinguished the feeble light of both lamps, and, turning
to the house-keeper, said:
"There, then! We can't yet tell a black thread from a white one, and I
must put out the lamps, as if this rich house were a beggar's hut. Two
hundred jars of shining oil were standing in the storehouses a week ago.
Why did the master let them be put on the ship and taken to Messina by
his brother and Mopsus?"
"And why isn't the fruit gathered yet?" asked Chloris.
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