large divan, more like a couch than a chair; her feet
were buried in the shaggy fell of a buffalo, and her knees and ankles
wrapped round with down-cushions covered with silk. Her head she held
very upright, and it was difficult to imagine how her slender throat
could support it, loaded as it was with strings of pearls and precious
stones which were braided in the tall structure of her reddish-gold
hair, that was arranged in long cylindrical curls pinned closely side by
side. The Empress's thin face looked particularly small under the
mass of natural and artificial adornment which towered above her brow.
Beautiful she could never have been, even in her youth, but her features
were regular, and the prefect confessed to himself as he looked at
Sabina's face, marked as it was with minute wrinkles and touched up with
red and white, that the sculptor who a few years previously had been
commissioned to represent her as 'Venus Victrix' might very well have
given the goddess a certain amount of resemblance to the imperial model.
If only her eyes, which were absolutely bereft of lashes, had not
been quite so small and keen--in spite of the dark lines painted round
them--and if only the sinews in her throat had not stood out quite so
conspicuously from the flesh which formerly had covered them!

With a deep bow Titianus took the Empress's right hand, covered with
rings; but she withdrew it quickly from that of her husband's friend and
relative, as if she feared that the carefully-cherished limb--useless as
it was for any practical purpose, a mere toy among hands--might suffer
some injury, and wrapped it and her arm in her upper-robe. But she
returned the prefect's friendly greeting with all the warmth at her
command. Though formerly at Rome she had been accustomed to see Titianus
every day at her house, this was their first meeting in Alexandria; for
the previous day, exhausted by the sufferings of her sea-voyage, she had
been carried in a closed litter to the Caesareum, and this morning she
had declined to receive his visit, as her whole time was given up to her
physicians, bathing-women, and coiffeurs.

"How can you survive in this country?" she said in a low but harsh
voice, which always made the hearer feel that it was that of a dull,
fractious, childless woman. "At noon the sun burns you up, and in the
evening it is so cold--so intolerably cold!' As she spoke she drew
her robe closer round her, but Titianus, pointing to the