after she arrived was characteristically
Bacchanal. She had a genius for making the tenderest feeling or the
deepest conviction seem absurd. Rufus did not know whether to be more
angry at her open hint to Pliny that his childlessness was like that
of so many millionaires of the day, a voluntary lure for the
attention of legacy hunters, or at her sardonic inquiries after
Tacitus's dyspepsia. His best friends knew that his gloom issued from
the travail of a mind which had sickened mortally under Domitian and
could not find in the present tranquillity more than a brief
interruption to the madness of men and the wrath of gods. It was not
that Quadratilla failed to perceive the massive intellectual force of
Tacitus. On the contrary, she enraged Rufus and the others still
further by a covert irony about Pliny's classing himself as a man of
letters with the historian, an innocent vanity which endeared him
only the more to those whose experience of his loyal and generous
heart left no room for critical appraisement of his mental calibre.

The day in question had been full of small annoyances. Calpurnia,
wishing, on the Feast of Fors Fortuna, to excuse the dining-room
servants from a noonday attendance, had had a luncheon served in the
grotto of the tidal spring. Unluckily, while they were testing the
ebb and flow by putting rings and other small objects on a dry spot
and watching the water cover them, Quadratilla lost out of one of
her rings a very valuable emerald. From that moment until the stone
was returned by Marcus everybody's patience had been strained to the
breaking point by the old lady's peevish temper. After dinner, when
they were sitting in the loggia overlooking the lake, which lay dark
and still beneath the June stars, they all united in a tacit effort
to divert her attention. Pliny told a story of some neighbours to
illustrate that the same kind of courage existed in the middle class
as in the aristocracy. A wife, finding that her husband was wasting
away with an incurable disease, not only urged him to end his life,
but joined him in the brave adventure, fastening his weakened body
to hers and then leaping with him from a window overlooking the lake.

Fannia agreed enthusiastically that the deed was as brave as the one
by which her famous grandmother had shown her husband the way to meet
an emperor's command to die; and she went on to say that she and Pliny
had decided once that some of the unknown hours of Ar