"I am not drunk," shouted Euphobias. "It is the hunger which persecutes me. Most of the time I can find no bread, and when I am so fortunate as to sit at a table like Sónnica's, the food which I eat escapes me."
"Say rather the wine which you drink escapes you," replied Sónnica, resting her head again on Actæon's breast.
The contortionist had reappeared before the table, and had greeted her mistress by touching her hands to her face. She was a girl of about fourteen, with yellowish skin, wearing a pair of red trunks. Her nervous and agile limbs, and her lean, undeveloped chest, made her look like a boy. The elder guests smiled, stirred by her fresh and almost masculine beauty.
She uttered a shout, and doubling over with elastic vigor stood on her hands, and with feet in the air and her head almost touching the floor, she began to run swiftly about the triclinium. Then, with a powerful spring of her arms, she leaped upon the table, and trotted on her hands among the confusion of plates, amphoræ, and cups, without upsetting them.
The guests applauded with enthusiasm. The two Greek merchants offered her their goblets, pinching her cheeks while she drank, and passing their hands caressingly over her back.
"Lachares," said the philosopher to his aristocratic enemy, "why have you and your companions not brought your beautiful slave boys who serve you as supports in the Forum?"
"Sónnica will not allow it," replied the young gallant, pleased at the question, not suspecting the irony in Euphobias' words. "She is a superior woman, but this is the only one of the refined customs of Athens which she declines to tolerate. She believes in Jupiter and Leda; but she spits upon the beautiful Ganymede. She is not a full-fledged Athenian."
A double row of broad, sharp swords was placed along the floor by a group of slaves, so that the contortionist might show her greatest feat. The flutists began to play a slow, solemn melody, and the contortionist, again standing head downward, began to walk between the swords without disturbing them or touching their sharp edges. The guests, cup in hand, followed her course anxiously through the forest of keen steel blades, which at her slightest wavering would penetrate her body. She paused near a sword, extended one arm, and sustaining herself on a single hand she bent the elbow until she kissed the floor; then she stiffened the muscles, raising herself back to her first position, and throughout this whole maneuvre the cutting edge grazed her breast without even abrading the skin.