So I agreed to stop chewing silphium, and I did stop. The next month when my blood came on time I was astonished, and the same the month after and the month after that. I knew that even at the festivals not every girl became pregnant every time, but I had expected Lysias’s fervor to have had results. He had never wanted me so much or so enthusiastically. I saw now that he had seen sterile coupling as hardly worth doing. I wasn’t comfortable about this change, but I didn’t feel I could talk to him about it.

After six months with no result, I talked to Kreusa, and she reassured me that sometimes it could take many months to become pregnant, and that I shouldn’t start to worry until it was a year.

After a year, I talked to her again, and she recommended green leaves, sunlight, relaxation, and prayers to Hera. I tried all of these, and never had my monthly blood arrive more than a day late. “Am I too old?” I asked her, a year after that, on a sunny autumn day while we were alone together on the shore smoking fish.

“What are you now, thirty-five, thirty-six? No, that’s not too old. Old for a first time, but there shouldn’t be any trouble. Lysias is a few years older, there might be problems on his side. Have him eat red meat when he can and abstain from fish.”

“Have you ever had a baby?” I asked her as I tossed some more wood onto the fire.

She frowned and paused, with a single fish in one hand and a stick with five more threaded on it in the other. “One, when I was young. My mistress beat me for being so careless with the silphium. I was lucky not to find myself out on the street. It was a boy, poor thing, and had to be exposed.” I remembered the baby I had exposed and how terrible I had felt, even though it couldn’t have survived and it was not my own. I put out my hand toward Kreusa, but she didn’t seem to see me. “I cried for days. By the time I had a house of my own and could have afforded a child, I’d found philosophy and didn’t want one. I’m surprised you do, honestly.” She plunged the stick through the fish abruptly and turned to put it on the smoke rack.

“I don’t, all that much,” I said. “Lysias really does. Now I’ve been trying for two years without getting anywhere, and he still feels strongly about it and I’m still ambivalent.”

“That’s probably your problem,” she said, her face still turned toward the fish and the fire. “Your ambivalence. If you truly wanted it, you’d get pregnant.”