plain, and the buoyant freshness of the morning
had entered into her heart and given her hope for the boy's future.
He was to grow strong and wise, his childish impetuosity was to be
disciplined, he was to study and become a lawyer and serve his country
as his ancestors had before him. His father's broken youth was to
continue in him, and her life was to fructify in his and in his
children's, when the time came.

The mother bowed her head upon her clenched hands. How empty, empty
her hopes had been! Even his boyhood had disappointed her, in spite
of his cleverness at his books. The irritability of his childhood
had become moroseness, and he had alienated more often than he had
attached his friends. A certain passionate sincerity, however, had
never been lacking in his worst moods; and toward her he had been
a loyal, if often heedless, son. In this loyalty, as the years passed,
she had come to place her last hope that he would be deaf to the siren
calls of the great city. Outdoor sports and wholesome friendships
he had rejected, even while his solitary nature and high-strung
temperament made some defense against temptation imperative.

When he was eighteen he refused to go into law, and declared for a
literary life. She had tried hard to conceal her disappointment and
timid chagrin. She realised that the literary circle in Rome was
quite different from any she knew. It was no more aristocratic than
her own, and yet she felt intuitively that its standards were even
more fastidious and its judgments more scornful. If Propertius were
to grow rich and powerful, as the great Cicero had, and win the
friendship of the old senatorial families, she could more easily
adjust herself to formal intercourse with them than to meeting on
equal terms such men as Tibullus and Ponticus and Bassus, and perhaps
even Horace and Virgil. But later her sensitive fear that she could
not help her son in his new career had been swallowed up in the anguish
of learning that he had entirely surrendered himself to a woman of
the town. This woman, she had been told, was much older than
Propertius, beautiful and accomplished, and the lure of many rich
and distinguished lovers. Why should she seek out a slight, pale boy
who had little to give her except a heart too honest for her to
understand?

When the knowledge first came to her, she had begged for her son's
confidence, until, in one of his morose moods, he had flung away from
her, leaving her to