und his first way into haunts
of the Subura which later became familiar enough to him, and at dawn
he came home spent. Standing at his window, he watched the pitiless,
grey light break over Rome. The magic city of the moonlit night, the
creation of fragile, reflected radiance, had evanished in bricks and
mortar. The city of his heart, also, built of gossamer dreams and
faiths, lay before him, reduced to the hideous realities of impure
love and lying friendship. In the chaos substituted for his
accustomed world he recognised only a grave in Troy.

His servant found him in a delirium and for a week his fever ran high.
In it were consumed the illusions of which it had been born. As he
gained strength again, he found that his anger against Caelius was
more contemptuous than regretful; he discovered a sneering desire
for Lesbia's beauty divorced from a regard for her purity. The ashes
of his old love for her, the love that Valerius had understood, in
the dusk, coming home from Mantua, were hidden away in their burial
urn. Should he hold out his cold hands to this new fire? Should he
go to her as a suppliant and pay in reiterated torture for
Clytemnestra's embrace and for Juno's regilded favours? He was
unaccustomed to weighing impulses, to resisting emotions. For the
first time in his life slothful reason arose and fought with desire.

The issue of the conflict was still in the balance when, a few days
later, a little gold box was brought to him without name or note.
Opening it he found a round, white stone. Loosened flame could have
leaped no more swiftly to its goal. Lesbia had said a white stone
marked in her memory the day she had first given herself to him. She
wanted him to come to her. She was holding out to him her white arms.
He trembled with a passion which no longer filtered through shyness.
The listlessness of his body was gone. His house was not a prison
and the Palatine was near. Valerius would never come back from Asia,
but Lesbia stood within his hand's sweet reach.

As he made his way through the Forum two drunken wretches shambled
past him, and he caught a coarse laugh and the words, "Our Palatine
Medea." Why did his ears ring, suddenly, strangely, with the laughter
of bright, blue waves and the cadences of a voice telling a child
Medea's story? Did he know that not the unawakening night but this
brief, garish day separated him from one who had listened to that
story with him in the covert of his mother'