agged her from pleasure to pleasure, and from one
spectacle to another, for it gratified him to show himself in public with
his beautiful young wife. She certainly was not free from frivolity, but
she had learnt early from her strict father, as being the guide of her
younger sisters, to distinguish clearly right from wrong, and the pure
from the unclean; and she soon discovered that the joys of the capital,
which had seemed at first to be gay flowers with bright colors, and
redolent with intoxicating perfume, bloomed on the surface of a foul bog.

She at first had contemplated all that was beautiful, pleasant, and
characteristic with delight; but her husband took pleasure only in things
which revolted her as being common and abominable. He watched her every
glance, and yet he pointed nothing out to her, but what was hurtful to
the feelings of a pure woman. Pleasure became her torment, for the
sweetest wine is repulsive when it has been tasted by impure lips. After
every feast and spectacle he loaded her with outrageous reproaches, and
when at last, weary of such treatment, she refused to quit the house, he
obliged her nevertheless to accompany him as often as the Legate
Quintillus desired it. The legate was his superior-officer, and he sent
her every day some present or flowers.

Up to this time she had borne with him, and had tried to excuse him, and
to think herself answerable for much of what she endured. But at
last--about ten months after her marriage--something occurred between her
and Phoebicius--something which stood like a wall of brass between him
and her; and as this something had led to his banishment to the remote
oasis, and to his degradation to the rank of captain of a miserable
maniple, instead of his obtaining his hoped for promotion, he began to
torment her systematically while she tried to protect herself by icy
coldness, so that at last it came to this, that the husband, for whom she
felt nothing but contempt, had no more influence on her life, than some
physical pain which a sick man is doomed to endure all through his
existence.

In his presence she was silent, defiant, and repellent, but as soon as he
quitted her, her innate, warm-hearted kindliness and child-like merriment
woke up to new life, and their fairest blossoms opened out in the
senator's house among the little troop who amply repaid her love with
theirs.

Phoebicius belonged to the worshippers of Mithras, and he often fasted in
his