while Pertinax was sucking at his
mother's breast in a Ligurian hut. Rome, my son, is sick of too much
mixed philosophy. She needs a man of iron--a riser to occasion--a
cutter of Gordian knots, precisely as a sick man needs a surgeon. The
senate will vote, as you say, at the praetorian guard's dictation. You
have been clever, my Sextus, with your stirring of faction against
faction. They are mean men, all so full of mutual suspicion as to heave
a huge sigh when they know that Pertinax is Caesar, knowing he will
overlook their plotting and rule without bloodshed if that can be done.
But it can't be! Unless Pertinax is man enough to strike the blow that
shall restore the ancient liberties, then he is better dead before he
tries to play the savior! We have a tyrant now. Shall we exchange him
for a weak-kneed theorist?"

"Are you ready to die, Galen?"

"Why not? Are you the only Roman? I am not so old I have no virtue
left. A little wisdom comes with old age, Sextus. It is better to live
for one's country than to die for it, but since no way has been invented
of avoiding death, it is wiser to die usefully than like a sandal thrown
on to the rubbish-heap because the fashion changes."

"I wish you would speak plainly, Galen. I have told you all my secrets.
You have seen me risk my life a thousand times in the midst of Commodus'
informers, coming and going, interviewing this and that one, urging
here, restraining there, denying myself even hope of personal reward.
You know I have been whole-hearted in the cause of Pertinax. Is it
right, in a crisis, to put me off with subtleties?"

"Life is subtle. So is virtue. So is this stuff," Galen answered,
poking at the mixture with a bronze spoon. "Every man must choose his
own way in a crisis. Some one's star has fallen. Commodus'? I think
not. That star blazed out of obscurity, and Commodus is not obscure.
Mine? I am unimportant; I shall make no splendor in the heavens when
my hour comes. Marcia's? Is she obscure? Yours? You are like me, not
born to the purple; when a sparrow dies, however diligently he has
labored in the dirt, no meteors announce his fall. No, not Maternus,
the outlaw, to say nothing of Sextus, the legally dead man, can command
such notice from the sky. That meteor was some one's who shall blaze
into fame and then die."

"Dark words, Galen!"

"Dark deeds!" the old man answered. "And a path to be chosen in
darkness! Shall I poison