a sort of Volstead Act on him, you understand. But he gets out—the god gets out. Of course, he gets out; on the q.t. He escapes into the hills—classical moonshine, classical bootlegging, you see. The women get hold of the stuff and, up there in the hills, begin celebrating 'mysteries'—all on the q.t. Attorney-General Pentheus says this must be stopped—law must be enforced. He sleuths up into the hills to spy them out. But the women, his own mother among them, catch him, and literally pull him to pieces, tear him limb from limb and strew the bloody fragments all over the place. That's the vengeance of Dionysus."
"How perfectly horrid!" exclaimed Cornelia.
"You know the play, Professor," said Willys, of course.
"Oh yes," I replied, as if I had been intimate with it from infancy. As a matter of fact, Oliver's telegraphic reference to Bacchus had prompted me to chuck Gilbert Murray's little book on Euripides into my traveling bag for train reading. That accident enabled me to sustain my bluff by a bit of critical wisdom. "The play is curious," I said, "coming from Euripides. He passes for a progressive, an intellectual radical. You would have expected him to sympathize with Pentheus,