me--the pale, impassive Lucilla looking
very long and slender, in her closely folded yellow veil, and high
nuptial crown.

As Marius turned away, glad to escape from the pressure of the crowd,
he found himself face to face with Cornelius, an infrequent spectator
on occasions such as this. It was a relief to depart with him--so
fresh and quiet he looked, though in all his splendid equestrian array
in honour of the ceremony--from the garish heat [232] of the marriage
scene. The reserve which had puzzled Marius so much on his first day
in Rome, was but an instance of many, to him wholly unaccountable,
avoidances alike of things and persons, which must certainly mean that
an intimate companionship would cost him something in the way of
seemingly indifferent amusements. Some inward standard Marius seemed
to detect there (though wholly unable to estimate its nature) of
distinction, selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the
fervid and corrupt life across which they were moving together:--some
secret, constraining motive, ever on the alert at eye and ear, which
carried him through Rome as under a charm, so that Marius could not but
think of that figure of the white bird in the market-place as
undoubtedly made true of him. And Marius was still full of admiration
for this companion, who had known how to make himself very pleasant to
him. Here was the clear, cold corrective, which the fever of his
present life demanded. Without it, he would have felt alternately
suffocated and exhausted by an existence, at once so gaudy and
overdone, and yet so intolerably empty; in which people, even at their
best, seemed only to be brooding, like the wise emperor himself, over a
world's disillusion. For with all the severity of Cornelius, there was
such a breeze of hopefulness--freshness and hopefulness, as of new
morning, about him. [233] For the most part, as I said, those refusals,
that reserve of his, seemed unaccountable. But there were cases where
the unknown monitor acted in a direction with which the judgment, or
instinct, of Marius himself wholly concurred; the effective decision of
Cornelius strengthening him further therein, as by a kind of outwardly
embodied conscience. And the entire drift of his education determined
him, on one point at least, to be wholly of the same mind with this
peculiar friend (they two, it might be, together, against the world!)
when, alone of a whole company of brilliant youth, he had wit