MFTAMORPHOSES BOOK II
and peaceful joy; and she can scarce restrain her tears at the sight, because she sees no cause for others' tears. Put, having entered the chamber of Cecrops' daughter, she performed the goddess' bid- ding, touched the girl's breast with her festering hand and filled her heart with pricking thorns Then she breathed pestilential, poisonous breath into her nostrils and spread black venom through her very heart and bones. And, to fix a cause for her grief, Envy pictured to her imagination her sister, her sister's blest marriage and the god in all his beauty, magnifying the excellence of everything. Maddened by this, Aglauros eats her heart out in secret misery; careworn by day, careworn by night, she groans and wastes away most wretchedly with slow decay, like ice touched by the fitful sunshine. She is consumed by envy of Herse's happiness; just as when a fire is set under a pile of weeds, which give out no flames and waste away with slow consump- tion. She often longed to die that she might not behold such happiness; often to tell it, as 'twere a crime, to her stern father At last she sat down at her sister's threshold, to prevent the god's entrance when he should come. And when he coaxed and prayed with his most honeyed words, " Have done, she said, "for I shall never stir from here till I have foiled your purpose." "We'll stand by that bargain," Mercury quickly replied, and with a touch of his heavenly wand he opened the door. At this the girl struggled to get up, but found the limbs she bends in sitting made motionless with dull heaviness; she strove to stand erect, but her knees had stiffened ; a numbing chill stole through her limbs, and her flesh was pale and bloodless, And, as an incurable cancer spreads its evil roots ever more widely and involves sound
