rning Emperors.
After what time, what labour the high gods
Builded the body of this beauty up!
Now at a whim they shatter it! More light!
I'll catch the last of the sun.

_Enter_ SLAVE

SLAVE. Mistress, below
The lady Acte stands and asks to see you.

POPPAEA. Come to inspect me fading: I fear not.
Even a woman's eyes I need not shun.
Bring her. [_Exit_ SLAVE.
Now, Myrrha, watch her hungering eyes.

_Enter_ ACTE, _ushered by_ SLAVE

POPPAEA. [_Vehemently._] Take Nero! I am dying.

ACTE. Ah, not yet!

POPPAEA. I am dying. But you shall not hold him long----
O, do not think it. Can you queen his heart?
Can you be storm a moment, sun the next?
A month, a long day under open skies,
Would find your art exhausted, ended. I!
I was a hundred women in an hour,
And sweeter at each moment than them all.
Why, I have struck him in the face and laughed.

ACTE. I love him: that concerns not him, nor you.
A different goal I would have sought for him,
A garment not of purple, but of peace.

POPPAEA. Of peace! Ha, ha!

ACTE. Vain now--I know it, vain.
But if your words are true, and death is on you,
Let us two at the least be friends at last.

POPPAEA. I bear no rancour--and yet if I dreamed
That I was leaving you upon his bosom--
But no: let there be peace between us two.

[ACTE _comes and kisses her._

Your kiss falls kind upon my loneliness.
But, Acte, to let go of glory thus--
For I have drunk of empire, and what cup
Afterward can you offer to these lips?

ACTE. Of late there has been stealing on my mind
A strange hope--a new vision.

POPPAEA. What is this?

ACTE. Do not laugh out at me: a sect despised--
The Christians, tell us of an after life,
A glory on the other side the grave.
If there should be a kingdom not of this world,
A spirit throne, a city of the soul!

POPPAEA. I want no spirit kingdom after death.
The splendid sun, the purple, and the crown,
These I have known, and I am losing them.

ACTE. Yet if the sun, the purple, and the crown
Were but the shadows of another sun,
Splendider--a more dazzling diadem?

POPPAEA. These can I see at least, and feel, and hear.

ACTE. Yes, with a mortal touch that falters now.

POPPAEA. [_Sobbing._] O Acte, to be dumb, and deaf, and blind!

ACTE. Or live again with more transcendent sense,