answering, declares that the reality of their joint
existence lies not in her, but in him:

". . . 'What! thou soundest in my soul
To depths below the deepest, reachest good
By evil, that makes evil good again,
And so allottest to me that I live,
And not die--letting die, not thee alone,
But all true life that lived in both of us?
Look at me once ere thou decree the lot!'

* * * * *

Therewith her whole soul entered into his,
He looked the look back, and Alkestis died."

But when she reaches the nether world--"the downward-dwelling
people"--she is rejected as a deceiver: "This is not to die," says the
Queen of Hades, for her death is a mockery, since it doubles the life of
him she has left behind:

"'Two souls in one were formidable odds:
Admetos must not be himself and thou!'

* * * * *

And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,
The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;
And lo, Alkestis was alive again."

How do our little squabbles--the "Sex-War"--look to us after this?

+ + + + +

When next we meet with Balaustion, in _Aristophanes' Apology_, she is
married to her Euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the
waters--this time back to Rhodes, from Athens which has fallen.

Many things have happened in the meantime, and Balaustion, leaving her
adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present
and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites
the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of Athens, she may free
herself from anguish. Euthukles shall write it down for her, and they
will go back to the night they heard Euripides was dead: "One year ago,
Athenai still herself." Together she and Euthukles had mused, together
glorified their poet. Euthukles had met the audience flocking homeward
from the theatre, where Aristophanes had that night won the prize which
Euripides had so seldom won. They had stopped him to hear news of the
other poet's death: "Balaustion's husband, the right man to ask"--but he
had refused them all satisfaction, and scornfully rated them for the
crown but now awarded. "Appraise no poetry," he had cried: "price
cuttlefish!"

Balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in Athens, but one work
of Aristophanes, the _Lysistrata_; and now, in breat