soon
enough to our cost. You have been talking with Eulaeus to-day; Eulaeus,
who fears and hates Publius, and it seems to me that you have hatched
some conspiracy against him; but if you dare to cast a single stone in
his path, to touch a single hair of his head, I will show you that even
a weak woman can be terrible. Nemesis and the Erinnyes from Alecto to
Megaera, the most terrible of all the gods, are women!"

Cleopatra had hissed rather than spoken these words, with her teeth set
with rage, and had raised her small fist to threaten her brother; but
Euergetes preserved a perfect composure till she had ceased speaking.
Then he took a step closer to her, crossed his arms over his breast, and
asked her in the deepest bass of his fine deep voice:

"Are you idiotically in love with this Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica,
or do you purpose to make use of him and his kith and kin in Rome
against me?"

Transported with rage, and without blenching in the least at her
brother's piercing gaze, she hastily retorted: "Up to 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 b