The porter stopped, surveyed him slowly from foot to head with an expression of boundless pity and contempt, and was in the act of walking off in the ecstasy of his disdain, when he was brought to suddenly by Philammon’s strong arm.
‘Ah!--I recollect. There is a compact.... Who is Athene? The goddess, giver of wisdom. Hera, spouse of Zeus, queen of the Celestials. Aphrodite, mother of love.... You are not expected to understand.’
Philammon did understand, however, so much as this, that Hypatia was a very unique and wonderful person in the mind of his little guide; and therefore asked the only further question by which he could as yet test any Alexandrian phenomenon--
The porter opened his eyes very wide, put his middle finger in a careful and complicated fashion between his fore and third fingers, and extending it playfully towards Philammon, performed therewith certain mysterious signals, the effect whereof being totally lost on him, the little man stopped, took another look at Philammon’s stately figure, and answered--
‘Of the human race in general, my young friend. The philosopher must rise above the individual, to the contemplation of the universal.... Aha!-Here is something worth seeing, and the gates are open.’ And he stopped at the portal of a vast building.
‘The patriarch’s tastes are more plebeian. He lives, they say, in two dirty little rooms--knowing what is fit for him. The patriarch’s house? Its antipodes, my young friend--that is, if such beings have a cosmic existence, on which point Hypatia has her doubts. This is the temple of art and beauty; the Delphic tripod of poetic inspiration; the solace of the earthworn drudge; in a word, the theatre; which your patriarch, if he could, would convert to-morrow into a--but the philosopher must not revile. Ah! I see the prefect’s apparitors at the gate. He is making the polity, as we call it here; the dispositions; settling, in short, the bill of fare for the day, in compliance with the public palate. A facetious pantomime dances here on this day every week--admired by some, the Jews especially. To the more classic taste, many of his movements--his recoil, especially--are wanting in the true antique severity--might be called, perhaps, on the whole, indecent. Still the weary pilgrim must be amused. Let us step in and hear.’