that the mere honesty of his conversation was more pleasing than
other men's flattery. His agreeableness to his young visitor to-day
was, in truth, a blossom of the same wisdom which had made of Lucius
Verus really a brother--the wisdom of not being exigent with men, any
more than with fruit-trees (it is his own favourite figure) beyond
their nature. And there was another person, still nearer to him,
regarding whom this wisdom became a marvel, of equity--of charity.

[218] The centre of a group of princely children, in the same apartment
with Aurelius, amid all the refined intimacies of a modern home, sat
the empress Faustina, warming her hands over a fire. With her long
fingers lighted up red by the glowing coals of the brazier Marius
looked close upon the most beautiful woman in the world, who was also
the great paradox of the age, among her boys and girls. As has been
truly said of the numerous representations of her in art, so in life,
she had the air of one curious, restless, to enter into conversation
with the first comer. She had certainly the power of stimulating a
very ambiguous sort of curiosity about herself. And Marius found this
enigmatic point in her expression, that even after seeing her many
times he could never precisely recall her features in absence. The lad
of six years, looking older, who stood beside her, impatiently plucking
a rose to pieces over the hearth, was, in outward appearance, his
father--the young Verissimus--over again; but with a certain feminine
length of feature, and with all his mother's alertness, or license, of
gaze.

Yet rumour knocked at every door and window of the imperial house
regarding the adulterers who knocked at them, or quietly left their
lovers' garlands there. Was not that likeness of the husband, in the
boy beside her, really the effect of a shameful magic, in which the
blood of the murdered gladiator, his true father, had been an
ingredient? Were the tricks for [219] deceiving husbands which the
Roman poet describes, really hers, and her household an efficient
school of all the arts of furtive love? Or, was the husband too aware,
like every one beside? Were certain sudden deaths which happened
there, really the work of apoplexy, or the plague?

The man whose ears, whose soul, those rumours were meant to penetrate,
was, however, faithful to his sanguine and optimist philosophy, to his
determination that the world should be to him simply what the higher