At first she kept at a distance from him, taking care not to interrupt
him in his meditations, but waiting on him unobtrusively, rendering
him many little services, watering his favourite trees, and gathering
sacred grass, and flowers for offerings to the gods. Then, as he
became more accustomed to her, she would amuse him with songs and
dances, and at last began to sit near him and talk of the pleasures of
love.

"One day, as if in all simplicity, she said 'Surely people are very
wrong in reckoning virtue, wealth and pleasure as the three great
objects of life?'

"'Tell me,' he answered, 'how far do you regard virtue as superior to
the other two?'

"'A very wise man like you,' she replied, 'can hardly learn anything
from an ignorant woman like me; but since you ask, I will tell you
what I think. There is no real acquisition of happiness or wealth
without virtue; but the latter is quite independent of the other two.
Without it, a man is nothing; but if he fully possesses it, he is so
purified by it that he may indulge in pleasures occasionally, and any
sin connected with them will no more adhere to him than dust to a
cloud. Look at all the stories of the amours of the gods. Are they the
less worshipped on that account? I think, therefore, that virtue is a
hundred times superior to the other two.' With many such specious
arguments as these, and by her winning ways, she contrived to make him
madly in love; so that, forgetting all his religious duties and former
austerities, he thought only how to please her.

"When she perceived this, she said to him 'Let us stay no longer in