ut his present life to his wife
and friends. A third volume of these poems, which he called _Tristia_,
had just appeared and more were likely to follow. He had an
extraordinary instinct for self-revelation.

But in spite of this freedom to raise his voice in Rome, it was obvious
that all that made life dear to Ovid had been taken away. The lover
of sovereign Rome, of her streets and porticoes and theatres, her
temples and forums and gardens, must live at the farthest limit of
the Empire, in a little walled town from whose highest towers a
constant watch was kept against the incursions of untamed barbarians.
The poet to whom war had meant the brilliance of triumphal pageants
in the Sacred Way must now see the rude farmers of a Roman colony
borne off as captives or sacrificing to the enemy their oxen and carts
and little rustic treasures. The man of fifty who had spent his youth
in writing love poetry and who through all his life had had an eye
for Venus in the temple of Mars must wear a sword and helmet, and
dream at night of poisoned arrows and of fetters upon his wrists.
The son of the Italian soil, bred in warmth, his eye accustomed to
flowers and brooks and fertile meadows, must shiver most of the year
under bitter north winds sweeping over the fields of snow which
melted under neither sun nor rain; and in spring could only watch
for the breaking up of the ice in the Danube, the restoration of the
gloomy plains to their crop of wormwood, and the rare arrival of some
brave ship from Italy or Greece. The acknowledged master of the Latin
tongue, the courted talker in brilliant circles in Rome must learn
to write and speak a barbarous jargon if he wished to have any
intercourse with his neighbours. The husband with the heart of a
child, whose little caprices and moods, whose appetite and health
had been the concern of tender eyes, must learn to be sick without
proper food or medicine or nursing, must before his time grow old
and grey and thin and weak, dragged from the covert of a woman's love.

* * * * *

It was spring again and the late afternoon air, which came through
the open window by which Fabia was sitting, was sweet with the year's
new hope, even though borne over city roofs. Fabia had dwelt with
sorrow day and night until there was no one of its Protean shapes
which she did not intimately know. She had even attained to a certain
tolerance of her own hysteria that first night wh