that
is why we yet have orange-blossoms at weddings and play the "Lohengrin
March," which is orange-trees expressed in sweet sounds.

Marcus was only twenty, and Faustina could not have been over
sixteen--we do not know her exact age. There are stories to the effect
that the wife of Marcus Aurelius severely tried her husband's temper at
times, but these tales seem to have arisen through a confusion of the
two Faustinas. The elder Faustina was the one who set the merry pace in
frivolity, and once said that any woman with a husband twenty years her
senior must be allowed a lover or two--goodness gracious!

As far as we know, the younger Faustina was a most loyal and loving
wife, the mother of a full dozen children. Coins issued by Marcus
Aurelius stamped with the features of his wife, and the inscription
Concordia, Faustina and Venus Felix, attest the felicity, or "felixity,"
of the marriage.

Their oldest boy, Commodus, was very much like his grandmother,
Faustina, and a man who knows all about the Law of Heredity tells me
that children are much more apt to resemble their grandparents than
their father and mother.

I believe I once said that no house is big enough for two families, but
this truth is like the Greek verb--it has many exceptions. In the same
house with Emperor Antoninus Pius dwelt Lucilla, mother of Marcus, and
Marcus and his wife. And they were all very happy--but life was rather
more peaceful after the death of Faustina, the elder, which occurred a
few years after her husband became Emperor.

She could not endure prosperity.

But her husband mourned her death and made a public speech in eulogy of
her, determined that only the best should be remembered of one who had
been the wife of an Emperor and the mother of his children. As far as
we know, Antoninus never spoke a word concerning his wife except in
praise, not even when she left his house to be gone for months.

It was Ouida, she of the aqua-fortis ink, who said, "A woman married to
a man as good as Antoninus must have been very miserable, for while men
who are thoroughly bad are not lovable, yet a man who is not
occasionally bad is unendurable." And so Ouida's heart went out in
sympathy and condolence to the two Faustinas, who wedded the only two
men mentioned in Roman history who were infinitely wise and good.

In one of his essays, Richard Steele writes this, "No woman ever loved a
man through life with a mighty love if the man did not occ