“I doubt if I am so beautiful,” said Hermione, “that I need follow your methods in order to make the acquaintance of sorrow. That’s what you intimate, I suppose. But what has this to do with my choice of a husband?”

“You observed quite correctly,” said Helen, “that my advice differed from my conduct. I have been explaining my conduct. Now let’s come back to the advice. Or rather, to your reasons for not liking Pyrrhus. You said Orestes is your fate. I’ve expressed my opinion of that theory, applied to Orestes or anyone else. You also said, if I remember, that Pyrrhus is a brute. Just what did you mean?”

“He has bloody hands, I think. I don’t care to marry a murderer.”

“He was a terrible fighter, if that’s what you mean,” said Helen. “Do you prefer Orestes because he wasn’t at the war?”

“Oh, no,” said Hermione. “I mean that Pyrrhus killed Polyxena afterward. I know there was some story about his being obliged to offer her up on his father’s tomb, for some good reason, but that sort of thing belongs to another age, as far as Orestes and I are concerned. It was plain murder, no matter how you explain it; it was no better than the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, when the fleet was sailing. When I think of your hero, that big strong man you praise to me, seizing a frail girl, dragging her to his distinguished father’s tomb, bending back her head, and cutting her throat, as we do to the animals at a sacrifice—I hate him and everything about him. Do you think I could love him, and give myself up to his arms? I’d always think of that other girl, and wonder whether he’d like to make a pious offering of me. He killed Priam, too, they say—at the last moment, when the desperate old man tried to fight. A feeble dotard, who couldn’t have harmed a child. Pyrrhus is a brute, and I rather think his father was too. Achilles liked to brain people, or cut them to pieces. Didn’t he kill a girl once—the Amazon? Ran his spear right through her!”

“I’ve often thought of these killings,” said Helen, “and with much the same horror as you express, but though there’s evidently a good deal of wrong in it all, it’s hard to know what is right. You say you can’t bear to think of sacrificing a girl as we slay animals on the altars?”

“I certainly can’t.”

“But you don’t object to sacrificing the animals?”

“Why should I? It’s a ceremony—that’s what they’re for!”

“I dare say there are people,” said Helen, “who shudder at the thought of drawing the knife across the throat of the poor sheep. Our religion is rather bloody, anyway, don’t you think?”