on
the road to Daphne of an afternoon in spring, when nearly all of
fashionable Antioch was beginning to flow in that direction. Horses,
litters and chariots, followed by crowds of slaves on foot with the
provisions for moonlight banquets, poured toward the northern gate, some
overtaking and passing the three but riding wide of the skewbald
Cappadocian stallion's heels.

"If Pertinax should really come," said Sextus.

"He will have a girl with him," Norbanus interrupted. He had an
annoying way of finishing the sentences that other folk began.

"True. When he is not campaigning Pertinax finds a woman irresistible."

"And naturally, also, none resists a general in the field!" Norbanus
added. "So our handsome Pertinax performs his vows to Aphrodite with a
constancy that the goddess rewards by forever putting lovely women in
his way! Whereas Stoics like you, Sextus, and unfortunates like me, who
don't know how to amuse a woman, are made notorious by one least lapse
from our austerity. The handsome, dissolute ones have all the luck. The
roisterers at Daphne will invent such scandalous tales of us tonight as
will pursue us for a lustrum, and yet there isn't a chance in a thousand
that we shall even enjoy ourselves!"

"Yes. I wish now we had chosen any other meeting place than Daphne,"
Sextus answered gloomily. "What odds? Had we gone into the desert
Pertinax would have brought his own last desperate adorer, and a couple
more to bore us while he makes himself ridiculous. Strange--that a man
so firm in war and wise in government should lose his head the moment a
woman smiles at him."

"He doesn't lose his head--much," Sextus answered. "But his father was
a firewood seller in a village in Liguria. That is why he so loves money
and the latest fashions. Poverty and rags--austerity inflicted on him
in his youth--great Jupiter! If you and I had risen from the charcoal-
burning to be consul twice and a grammarian and the friend of Marcus
Aurelius; if you and I were as handsome as he is, and had experienced a
triumph after restoring discipline in Britain and conducting two or
three successful wars; and if either of us had such a wife as Flavia
Titiana, I believe we could besmirch ourselves more constantly than
Pertinax does! It is not that he delights in women so much as that he
thinks debauch is aristocratic. Flavia Titiana is unfaithful to him.
She is also a patrician and unusually clever. He has never underst