in her childhood a long voyage in a
ship. Her mother must have been a _lupa_ also, and she herself the
result of a meeting with a mariner. The name of Bacchis, which had been
given her when she was little, had been borne by many famous courtesans
of Greece. No doubt she had been sold to some old woman by the pilot who
had brought her to Saguntum, and, while still a child, long before
coming to maturity, was visited in the old woman's hut by aged merchants
of the port or libertines of the city.

When her owner died she became a _lupa_, and passed into submission to
mariners, fishermen, shepherds from the mountains, and to all the brutal
horde which swarmed around the port. She was not yet twenty, but she was
aged, disfigured, wasted by excesses and by blows. She had always seen
the city from a distance. She had only entered it twice. The _lupas_
were not tolerated there. They were allowed to remain near the fane of
Aphrodite, as a guarantee of the security of Saguntum, that thus the
rabble which came to the port from all lands might be held at a
distance, but in the city the Iberians of cleanly habits became
indignant at the mere sight of the wantons, and the corrupt Greeks were
too refined in their tastes to feel pity for those sellers of the body
who fell like beasts beside the roadway for a bunch of grapes or a
handful of nuts.

There in the shadow of the temple of Aphrodite she had spent her life,
ever awaiting new ships and new men, hairy and obscene, brutal as
satyrs, made ferocious by the abstinence of the sea, to be at last
assassinated in some mariners' fight, or found the victim of hunger,
dead beside some abandoned boat.

"And you--who are you?" Bacchis asked at last. "What is your name?"

"My name is Actaeon; my native land is Athens. I have traveled over the
world; in some parts I have been a soldier, in others a navigator; I
have fought, I have trafficked, and I have even written verses, and
discussed with philosophers things which you do not understand. I have
been rich many times, and now you give me food. That is all my story."

Bacchis looked at him with eyes full of admiration, divining through his
concise words a past crammed with adventures, with terrible dangers and
prodigious changes of fortune. She thought of the deeds of Achilles, and
of the adventurous life of Ulysses, so often heard in the verses
declaimed by Greek mariners when they were drunk.

The courtesan, reclining on the Greek's b