Fair Game 



pleasant dalliance. Retribution I delivered over, 

 but I sped it on its course. 



All mythology, however, this daring act had 

 tinted for me with new colors. The goddesses, 

 flushed so wantonly in all their amorous histories, 

 I now saw chaste of hue, downcast, and modest- 

 pale. Their lovers, self -professed and known to 

 be obedient only to divine solicitations, I knew 

 for tricksters, hypocrites, and cheats. Father 

 Anchises, reverend patriarch! He had been 

 frisking with some rustic in a daisy-field, not led 

 by any Queen of Love to meadows set with 

 asphodel. Endymion, that shy, gauche youth 

 who drooped before the moon's advance. He had 

 slept snug beneath some cottage roof, not out 

 upon a dewy hillside where Artemis had held him 

 captive by her beams. And I by right of my 

 humiliation now stood firm with Venus and with 

 Artemis, those innocent celestials. Of such stuff 

 as theirs, at least, was my last legend made. 



[193] 



