lated morals, their bodily passions
being kept in abeyance by their love of gain; but this axiom could
scarcely hold good with respect to these women--however thievish they
might be, they did care for something besides gain: they cared for their
husbands. If they did thieve, they merely thieved for their husbands;
and though, perhaps, some of them were vain, they merely prized their
beauty because it gave them favour in the eyes of their husbands.
Whatever the husbands were--and Jasper had almost insinuated that the
males occasionally allowed themselves some latitude--they appeared to be
as faithful to their husbands as the ancient Roman matrons were to
theirs. Roman matrons! and, after all, might not these be in reality
Roman matrons? They called themselves Romans; might not they be the
descendants of the old Roman matrons? Might not they be of the same
blood as Lucretia? And were not many of their strange names--Lucretia
amongst the rest--handed down to them from old Rome? It is true their
language was not that of old Rome; it was not, however, altogether
different from it. After all, the ancient Romans might be a tribe of
these people, who settled down and founded a village with the tilts of
carts, which by degrees, and the influx of other people, became the grand
city of the world. I liked the idea of the grand city of the world owing
its origin to a people who had been in the habit of carrying their houses
in their carts. Why, after all, should not the Romans of history be a
branch of these Romans? There were several points of similarity between
them; if Roman matrons were chaste, both men and women were thieves. Old
Rome was the thief of the world; yet still there were difficulties to be
removed before I could persuade myself that the old Romans and my Romans
were identical; and in trying to remove these difficulties, I felt my
brain once more beginning to turn, and in haste took up another subject
of meditation, and that was the patteran, and what Ursula had told me
about it.

I had always entertained a strange interest for that sign by which in
their wanderings the Romanese gave to those of their people who came
behind intimation as to the direction which they took; but it now
inspired me with greater interest than ever--now that I had learnt that
the proper meaning of it was the leaves of trees. I had, as I have said
in my dialogue with Ursula, been very eager to learn the word for leaf in
the Roman