ore in the smile of Trajan. Her liking for Calpurnia was of
a piece, her acquaintances thought, with her bringing up of her
grandson. No boy in Rome had had an austerer training. He was never
allowed to mingle with her coarser companions, and when the dice were
brought in she always sent him out of the room--"back to his books."
No breath of scandal had ever touched his good name, and his tastes
could not have been more prudent, his grandmother used to say, with
uplifted eyebrows, had he had the "inestimable advantage of being
brought up by Pliny's uncle."

After a winter and spring of varied activities the friends gathered
at Pliny's villa had eagerly looked forward to a brief peace. Pliny's
law business had been unusually exacting. He had worked early and
late, and made a series of crucial speeches, and when spring came
on he had allowed neither work nor social demands to interfere with
his attendance at the almost numberless literary readings. His
"conscientious and undiscriminating concern for dead matter,"
Quadratilla once said, "rivalled Charon's." Calpurnia, never strong,
but always supplementing at every turn her husband's work, had felt
especially this year the strain of Roman life. Tacitus, already a
figure in the literary world through his _Agricola_ and _Germania_,
had made a beginning on his more elaborate _Histories_ and been
enslaved to his genius. Pompeius Saturninus and his clever wife,
Cornelia, were hoping for a little rustic idleness before beginning
the summer entertaining at their place in Tuscany. The group under
Pliny's roof was completed by Calpurnia's lovely aunt, Hispulla, and
Fannia, whose famous ancestry was accentuated in her own
distinguished character. Pliny's old schoolfellow, Caninus Rufus,
had come to his adjacent villa, bringing with him their common friend,
Voconius Romanus. These friends had entered upon one of the holiday
seasons rarely granted to people of importance. Their debts to the
worlds of business or society or literature held in abeyance, they
were lightly devoting their days to fishing and hunting, sailing and
riding, while the keenness of their intellectual interests--they
belonged to a very different set from Quadratilla's--was restfully
tempered and the sincerity of them deepened by a thorough-going
intimacy.

Upon the second fortnight of this life Quadratilla broke like a
thunder-squall. Whatever feelings had prompted her to leave her
fashionable resort, her mood