held several minor offices in
the City Government, had been one of the quaestors the year before, and so
was now a senator. But he was, as he always had been, as he remained, a
booby. I do not believe that there was any man in Rome I detested so
heartily.

He greeted me as if he had a right to my notice and said:

"I was told that Egnatius Capito was in this garden."

"He was," I replied curtly, "but he has left it."

"I certainly am disappointed," he said, seating himself by me, uninvited.
"I particularly wanted to speak to Capito at once."

"You might find him at his house," I suggested.

But Bambilio was impervious to suggestions.

"I wanted to talk to him and you together," he said, "but that can be
managed some other time."

I was about to reply tartly, but I remembered how my irritation with
Capito had affected me and recalled Galen's injunction that I must avoid
all causes of excitement and emotion. I held my peace.

Bambilio, as if he had been an intimate and had been specially invited,
lolled comfortably on the bench and gazed approvingly about.

"Fine garden, Andivius," he said. "Fine trees, fine flowers and I say,
what a jewel of a slave-girl, eh! Hedulio!"

I could have hit him, I was so incensed at his familiarity, I was already
choking with internal rage at Agathemer for having let anyone in to talk
to me in that garden, still more at his having done so without consulting
me and most of all that after doing so he had not made sure that no one
but Capito could pass the postern door. But I almost exploded into voluble
wrath when I looked where he indicated, saw a pretty, shapely young woman
in the scanty attire of a slave-girl picking flag-flowers into a basket
she carried, and recognized Vedia. That Agathemer's presumption should
have spoiled the interview with Vedia which she and Nemestronia had
manifestly arranged for us, that it should have exposed Vedia in her
undignified disguise to recognition by the greatest ass and blatherskite
in the senate, this infuriated me till I felt internally like Aetna or
Vesuvius on the verge of eruption.

Vedia, for it was she, had evidently been approaching me circuitously,
hoping to be noticed and hailed from afar. Now when she was near enough
for not merely a lover but for any acquaintance to recognize her, she
looked up at me over her basket as she laid a flower-stalk in it.

Instantly her face flamed, she turned away and went on picking flowers
dilige