; our dove has followed the lure of a
dove-catcher who will not allow me to have her, and who is now billing
and cooing with her in his own nest. I am cheated, but I can scarcely be
angry with the Roman, for his claim was of older standing than mine."

"The Roman?" asked Cleopatra, rising from her seat and turning pale. "But
that is impossible. You are making common cause with Eulaeus, and want to
set me against Publius Scipio. At the banquet last night you showed
plainly enough your ill-feeling against him."

"You seem to feel more warmly towards him. But before I prove to you that
I am neither lying nor joking, may I enquire what has this man, this
many-named Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, to recommend him above any
handsome well-grown Macedonian, who is resolute in my cause, in the whole
corps of your body guard, excepting his patrician pride? He is as bitter
and ungenial as a sour apple, and all the very best that you--a subtle
thinker, a brilliant and cultivated philosopher--can find to say is no
more appreciated by his meanly cultivated intellect than the odes of
Sappho by a Nubian boatman."

"It is exactly for that," cried the queen, "that I value him; he is
different from all of us; we who--how shall I express myself--who always
think at second-hand, and always set our foot in the rut trodden by the
master of the school we adhere to; who squeeze our minds into the moulds
that others have carved out, and when we speak hesitate to step beyond
the outlines of those figures of rhetoric which we learned at school! You
have burst these bonds, but even your mighty spirit still shows traces of
them. Publius Scipio, on the contrary, thinks and sees and speaks with
perfect independence, and his upright sense guides him to the truth
without any trouble or special training. His society revives me like the
fresh air that I breathe when I come out into the open air from the
temple filled with the smoke of incense--like the milk and bread which a
peasant offered us during our late excursion to the coast, after we had
been living for a year on nothing but dainties."

"He has all the admirable characteristics of a child!" interrupted
Euergetes. "And if that is all that appears estimable to you in the Roman
your son may soon replace the great Cornelius."

"Not soon! no, not till he shall have grown older than you are, and a
man, a thorough man, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,
for such a man is Publius! I