at recollecting the slanders I then credited. But, the
point is, you remember her."

"My dear," I said, "if I had never set eyes on Marcia except when I
encountered her in the Baths of Titus the day you rescued me from drowning
when I fainted in the swimming pool, I'd remember her for life. She is too
beautiful to forget."

"Am I so hideous?" she demanded.

"You are the loveliest woman alive," I vowed. "But Marcia is amazingly
spectacular and the pictures she makes impress themselves on one's memory
and eyesight. I could never forget her in that brilliant tableau on the
camp-platform facing the mutineers, even if I had never seen her before."

"I was coming to that," Vedia said. "Marcia, who was a foundling and a
slave as the adopted child of a slave, has risen so high that she is truly
Empress in all but the official title. She has all the honors Faustina or
Crispina ever had, except that she keeps out of those religious rites,
participation in which is confined to women married with the full old-time
ceremonies and observances."

I then told her what Agathemer and I had heard about Marcia while
domiciled with Colgius, and of the absence from all talk about her of any
mention of or allusion to Marcus Martius; I asked if she knew what had
become of him or, indeed, anything about him.

"Oh, yes," she said, "all Roman society knew the main facts and dear old
Tanno supplied me with many of the intimate details. Commodus made a point
of having Martius specially presented to him because he had heard that he
had been, with you and Tanno, one of the foremost fighters in your affrays
in Vediamnum and near Villa Satronia. At his private audience he
congratulated and bepraised Martius and acclaimed his prowess. Martius,
who seems to have been a very fine fellow, disclaimed any pretensions to
such laudations and modestly stated that he had, at the beginning of each
fight, been far in the rear in your travelling-coach, with Marcia; that
she had clung to him and so delayed his getting out; that each time he had
gotten out and picked up the staff of a disabled combatant, but that, in
each combat, he had arrived barely in time to land a few blows on some of
the routed enemy; that in neither affray had he done any real fighting or
been in any danger or performed any exploits.

"Commodus, in his blunt way, had asked whether he was good for anything,
anyhow. Martius had replied that he was considered more than a mediocre
horse-ma