s too fond Of promenading in the colonnades and
temples, where a _cavaliere servente_, ostensibly her business
man--though he does not look like it--may regularly be seen carrying
her parasol. When at home, she neglects her attire and plasters her
face with dough in order to smooth out the wrinkles, so that she may
give to anybody but her own family the benefit of her beauty. There is
the ruinously extravagant Pollia, whose passion for jewels and fine
clothes runs her deeply into debt, for which, fortunately, her husband
is not responsible. There is Canidia, who is shrewdly suspected of
having poisoned more than one husband and who has either divorced or
been divorced by so many that she has had eight of them in five years,
and dates events by them instead of in the regular way by the
consulships: "Let me see. That was in the year in which I was married
to So-and-So." There is Asinia, whose selfishness is so great, and her
affection so frivolous, that she will weep over a sparrow and "let her
husband die to save her lap-dog's life." All these women are most
likely childless, and many a noble Roman house threatens to become
extinct.

There are others, again, whose foibles are more innocent. Baebia, for
example, is merely a victim to superstition. She is always consulting
the astrologers, the witches, and the dream-readers; she is devoted to
the mystic worship of the Egyptian Isis, with its secret rites of
purification, or she is a proselyte to the pestilent notions of the
Jews. She is too much under the influence of some squalid Oriental who
carries his pedlar's basket, or whose business is to buy broken glass
for sulphur matches Meanwhile Corellia is a blue-stocking, as bad as a
_precieuse_ with a _salon_. As soon as you sit down to table she
begins to quote Homer and Virgil and to compare their respective
merits. She cultivates bright conversation in both Greek and Latin,
and her tongue goes loudly and incessantly like a bell or gong. Her
poor husband is never permitted to indulge in an expression which is
not strictly grammatical. Worse still, she probably even writes little
poems of her own. She may keep a tame tutor in philosophy, but she
makes no scruple about interrupting his lesson on morals while she
writes a little billet-doux. Pomponia is an ambitious woman, whose
mania is to interfere in elections by bringing to bear upon the
senators what has been called in recent times the "duchesses'"
influence. If her hu