I too should be as frank. If my words
offend, remember that it is I who shall grieve most. Your daughter, fair
though she is, and lovely, is yet a child, despite her years,--a child
who needs the care and thought which only love can give. Needing all,
she could give nothing save herself to her husband; and man's needs are
of the spirit as well as of the flesh. And suppose he wanted not the
gift; what would there be for him? You see, I set aside all mention of
her dower; for though a man may marry gold, he must marry the woman
also. I have watched Marius from his cradle; I have marked when his
nature followed the lines along which I strove to train it, and when it
turned of itself into new channels of its own. And of these channels,
some, I confess, ran widely counter to those which I had planned. No
parent ever saw a child grow precisely to the measure of the ideal of
which he dreamed; it may be that every father under the sun is doomed to
disappointment at some trait or other in the child of his flesh."

Eudemius looked away from him, nodding soberly.

"So it hath been with me," said Livinius. "Marius has been a good son;
but a good man he has not been. For a bad man may make a good son, even
though a bad son never makes a good man. But I am not blind, and year by
year have I watched the changes in him, some for the better, some for
the worse. When he was a child I chastised; when he was a youth I
counselled; when he became a man I could do no more than stand aside and
watch him start upon the road he had marked out for himself. And I tell
you, Eudemius,--and you may guess if the words come easily,--that were I
in your place I would not give my daughter, being what she is, to such a
man as he. For her sake as well as his I say this. He is my son, and my
house is his home for so long as he wills it, and what I have is his.
But to your daughter, young, innocent, knowing nothing of the world, and
less than nothing of men, he would bring only unhappiness and woe. She
could not understand him; he would be at no pains to understand her.
Whether love might raise him to its own height, I dare not say; rather I
fear that he would lower it to him. He is passionate, yet cold; but he
is strong, and to men he is loyal and a lasting friend. He is a soldier
through and through; no mistress, were she never so madly loved, could
come before his sword. For to him, arms mean ambition and the fame he
has set himself to gain; love is a da