this moment only
the first perhaps--for what is my husband to me? But if you go on as you
have begun I shall begin to consider how I may make use of his influence
and of his liking for me, on the shores of the Tiber."

"Liking!" cried Euergetes, and he laughed so loud and violently that Zoe,
who was listening at the tent door, gave a little scream, and Cleopatra
drew back a step. "And to think that you--the most prudent of the
prudent--who can hear the dew fall and the grass grow, and smell here in
Memphis the smoke of every fire that is lighted in Alexandria or in Syria
or even in Rome--that you, my mother's daughter, should be caught over
head and ears by a broad-shouldered lout, for all the world like a clumsy
town-girl or a wench at a loom. This ignorant Adonis, who knows so well
how to make use of his own strange and resolute personality, and of the
power that stands in his background, thinks no more of the hearts he sets
in flames than I of the earthen jar out of which water is drawn when I am
thirsty. You think to make use of him by the 'Tiber; but he has
anticipated you, and learns from you all that is going on by the Nile and
everything they most want to know in the Senate.

"You do not believe me, for no one ever is ready to believe anything that
can diminish his self-esteem--and why should you believe me? I frankly
confess that I do not hesitate to lie when I hope to gain more by untruth
than by that much-belauded and divine truth, which, according to your
favorite Plato, is allied to all earthly beauty; but it is often just as
useless as beauty itself, for the useful and the beautiful exclude each
other in a thousand cases, for ten when they coincide. There, the gong is
sounding for the third time. If you care for plain proof that the Roman,
only an hour before he visited you this morning, had our little Hebe
carried off from the temple, and conveyed to the house of Apollodorus,
the sculptor, at Memphis, you have only to come to see me in my rooms
early to-morrow after the first morning sacrifice. You will at any rate
wish to come and congratulate me; bring your children with you, as I
propose making them presents. You might even question the Roman himself
at the banquet to-day, but he will hardly appear, for the sweetest gifts
of Eros are bestowed at night, and as the temple of Serapis is closed at
sunset Publius has never yet seen his Irene in the evening. May I expect
you and the children after morning sa