“You, sir? From a feast, sir?” The expression on the slave’s face said everything that needed saying. “Where’s your father, sir?”

“He’s still back there,” Menedemos said. The slave looked more astonished yet. Usually Menedemos’ father was the one who came home early and he was the one who stayed out late.

He walked through the entry hall and into the courtyard. Angry shouts came from the kitchen. Menedemos sighed. His stepmother and Sikon the cook were wrangling again. Baukis, who wanted to be a good household manager, was convinced Sikon spent too much. The cook was equally convinced she wanted him to pass the rest of his life fixing nothing but barley porridge and salted fish.

Baukis stalked out of the kitchen with a thoroughly grim expression on her face. It crumbled into surprise when she saw Menedemos. “Oh. Hail,” she said, and then, as the slave had, “I didn’t expect you home so soon.”

“Hail,” he replied, and shrugged. When he looked at her, he had trouble thinking of his father’s second wife as his stepmother. Baukis was ten or eleven years younger than he. She wasn’t a striking beauty, but she had a very nice shape: a much nicer one now than she’d had when she came into the house a couple of years before at the age of fourteen. Menedemos went on, “I didn’t feel like staying around, so I came back by myself while it was still light.”

“All right,” Baukis said. “Do you have any idea when Philodemos will be along?”

Menedemos tossed his head to show he didn’t. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say he and Uncle Lysistratos and Sostratos will all come home together, with some linkbearers to light the way for them.”

“That sounds sensible,” Baukis agreed. “I really do want to talk to him about Sikon. The insolence that fellow has! You’d think he owned this place instead of being a slave here.” She frowned so hard, a vertical line appeared between her eyebrows.