struggle to raise
herself from the degradation of slavery, she were obliged to engage in a
rivalry with her mistress, and, by robbing her of the affection
naturally belonging to her, were to crush her to the earth, it was a
thing to be deplored, but it must none the less be done. She might,
perhaps, pity the victim, but the sacrifice must be accomplished all the
same.

But now these vague dreams of a somewhat better lot, to be determined by
future chance circumstances, rolled away like a shapeless cloud, and
left in their place one bright image as the settled object of her
ambition. So lofty, so dazzling seemed the prize, that another person
would have shrunk in dismay from even the thought of striving for it,
and even she, for the moment, recoiled. But she was of too determined a
nature to falter long. The higher the object to be attained the fewer
would be the competitors, and the greater the chance of success to
unwearying determination. And if there were but one chance of success in
a thousand, it were still worth the struggle.

This great thought which stimulated her ambition was nothing less than
the resolution to become the wife of the imperator Sergius. At first it
startled her with its apparent wild extravagance; but little by little,
as she weighed the chances, it seemed to become more practicable. There
was, indeed, nothing grossly impossible in the idea. Men of high rank
had ere now married their slaves, and the corrupted society of Rome had
winked at mesalliances which, in the days of the republic, would not
have been tolerated. And she was merely a slave from accidental
circumstances--being free born, and having, but a month before, been the
pride and ornament of a respectable though lowly family. Once let her
liberty be restored, and the scarcely perceptible taint of a few weeks'
serfdom be removed from her, and she would be, in all social respects,
fully the equal of the poor, trembling maid of Ostia, to whom, a few
years before, the patrician had not been ashamed to stoop.

This bar of social inequality thus removed, the rest might be in her own
hands. Sergius no longer felt for his wife the old affection, under the
impulse of which he had wedded her; and the few poor remains of the love
which he still cherished, more from habit than otherwise, were fast
disappearing. This was already so evident as to have become the common
gossip of even the lowliest slaves in the household. And he loved
herself ins