Page:Plautus and Terence.djvu/114

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102
THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE.

I thank you for the thanks. But that you name it
Troubles me somewhat; thus reminding me
Seems half to charge me with ingratitude;—
Sir, in one word, what would you have me do?

Simo will tell him. It was true,—there was nothing between his son and Chrysis; his visits were really not to her. But Chrysis died a short time ago; and Pamphilus, as a mark of respect to an old acquaintance, had followed amongst the mourners at her funeral. Simo—one of the many idle old gentlemen who were wont to be spectators on such occasions—had seen his son actually wipe away a tear. He was charmed, he tells Sosia, at such a mark of true sensibility. "If he weeps, said I to myself, for a person who was a mere common acquaintance, what would he not do for me—his father!" Suddenly a young woman, hitherto unknown, attracted his attention: of such a ravishing beauty that the staid father of the family grows positively enthusiastic—rather to the surprise of the discreet Sosia—in his description. When the corpse is laid, according to Athenian custom, on the funeral pile, this interesting young stranger, in the agony of her grief, crept so close to it as to be almost caught by the flames; when a young man rushed forward, clasped her in his arms with the tenderest expressions of affection, calling her his "darling Glycerium," and led her off sobbing very familiarly on his shoulder—quite as if she was used to the situation. And this young man was Pamphilus—and his father looking on with his own eyes! He had gone home, as he tells Sosia, in such mood as might be imagined after witnessing this outrageous conduct in