nurious with them; but my father
acted haughtily with clients on principle, and taught me to treat them
in like manner. But when I saw their worn mantles and hungry faces, I
had a feeling something like compassion. I gave command to bring them
food, and conversed besides with them,--called some by name, some I
asked about their wives and children,--and again in the eyes before me
I saw tears; again it seemed to me that Lygia saw what I was doing, that
she praised and was delighted. Is my mind beginning to wander, or is
love confusing my feelings? I cannot tell. But this I do know; I have
a continual feeling that she is looking at me from a distance, and I am
afraid to do aught that might trouble or offend her.

"So it is, Caius! but they have changed my soul, and sometimes I feel
well for that reason. At times again I am tormented with the thought,
for I fear that my manhood and energy are taken from me; that, perhaps,
I am useless, not only for counsel, for judgment, for feasts, but for
war even. These are undoubted enchantments! And to such a degree am I
changed that I tell thee this, too, which came to my head when I lay
wounded: that if Lygia were like Nigidia, Poppaea, Crispinilla, and our
divorced women, if she were as vile, as pitiless, and as cheap as they,
I should not love her as I do at present. But since I love her for that
which divides us, thou wilt divine what a chaos is rising in my soul, in
what darkness I live, how it is that I cannot see certain roads before
me, and how far I am from knowing what to begin. If life may be compared
to a spring, in my spring disquiet flows instead of water. I live
through the hope that I shall see her, perhaps, and sometimes it seems
to me that I shall see her surely. But what will happen to me in a year
or two years, I know not, and cannot divine. I shall not leave Rome.
I could not endure the society of the Augustians; and besides, the one
solace in my sadness and disquiet is the thought that I am near Lygia,
that through Glaucus the physician, who promised to visit me, or through
Paul of Tarsus, I can learn something of her at times. No; I would not
leave Rome, even were ye to offer me the government of Egypt. Know also,
that I have ordered the sculptor to make a stone monument for Gulo, whom
I slew in anger. Too late did it come to my mind that he had carried me
in his arms, and was the first to teach me how to put an arrow on a bow.
I know not why it was that a recol