Still, he was gentle and kind, took his sister’s children in his arms, played with the Graces, whistled to the birds, went in and out, and played a valiant part at every meal.  Now and again he would ask after Arsinoe.  Once he allowed himself to be guided to the house where she lived, but he would not knock at Paulina’s door and seemed overawed by the grandeur of the house.  After he had been brooding and dreaming for a week, so idle, listless, and absent that his mother’s heart was filled with anxious fears every time she looked at him, his brother Teuker hit upon a happy idea.

The young gem-cutter was not usually a frequent visitor to his parents’ house, but since the return of the hapless Pollux he called there almost daily.  His apprenticeship was over and he seemed on the high-road to become a great master in his art; nevertheless he esteemed his brother’s gifts as far beyond his own and had tried to devise some means of reawakening the dormant energies of the luckless man’s brain.

“It was at this table,” said Teuker to his mother, “that Pollux used to sit.  This evening I will bring in a lump of clay and a good piece of modelling wax.  Just put it all on the table and lay his tools by the side of it; perhaps when he sees them he will take a fancy again to work.  If he can only make up his mind to model even a doll for the children he will soon get into the vein again, and he will go on from small things to great.”

Teuker brought the materials, Doris set them out with the modelling tools, and next morning watched her son’s proceedings with an anxious heart.  He got up late, as he had always done since his return home, and sat a long time over the bowl of porridge which his mother had prepared for his breakfast.  Then he sauntered across to his table, stood in front of it awhile, broke off a piece of clay and kneaded and moulded it in his fingers into balls and cylinders, looked at one of them more closely and then, flinging it on the ground, he said, as he leaned across the table supporting himself on both hands to put his face near his mother’s: 

“You want me to work again; but it is of no use—­I could do no good with it.”

The old woman’s eyes filled with tears, but she did not answer him.  In the evening Pollux begged her to put away the tools.

When he was gone to bed she did so, and while she was moving about with a light in the dark, lumber-room in which she had kept them with other disused things, her eye fell on the unfinished wax model which had been the last work of her ill-starred son.  A new idea struck her.  She called Euphorion, made him throw the clay into the court-yard and place the model on the table by the side of the wax.  Then she put out the very same tools as he had been using on the fateful day of their expulsion from Lochias, close to the cleverly-sketched portrait, and begged her husband to go out with her quite early next morning and to remain absent till mid-day.