pier by your*

It was the very spirit of the scene and the hour--the hour Marius had
spent in the imperial house. How temperate, how tranquillising! what
humanity! Yet, as he left the eminent company concerning whose ways of
life at home he had been so youthfully curious, and sought, after his
manner, to determine the main trait in all this, he had to confess that
it was a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity for once
really golden.

NOTES

225. +"Limpid" is misprinted "Limped."

CHAPTER XIV: MANLY AMUSEMENT

DURING the Eastern war there came a moment when schism in the empire
had seemed possible through the defection of Lucius Verus; when to
Aurelius it had also seemed possible to confirm his allegiance by no
less a gift than his beautiful daughter Lucilla, the eldest of his
children--the domnula, probably, of those letters. The little lady,
grown now to strong and stately maidenhood, had been ever something of
the good genius, the better soul, to Lucius Verus, by the law of
contraries, her somewhat cold and apathetic modesty acting as
counterfoil to the young man's tigrish fervour. Conducted to Ephesus,
she had become his wife by form of civil marriage, the more solemn
wedding rites being deferred till their return to Rome.

The ceremony of the Confarreation, or religious marriage, in which
bride and bridegroom partook together of a certain mystic bread, was
celebrated accordingly, with due pomp, early in the spring; Aurelius
himself [231] assisting, with much domestic feeling. A crowd of
fashionable people filled the space before the entrance to the
apartments of Lucius on the Palatine hill, richly decorated for the
occasion, commenting, not always quite delicately, on the various
details of the rite, which only a favoured few succeeded in actually
witnessing. "She comes!" Marius could hear them say, "escorted by her
young brothers: it is the young Commodus who carries the torch of
white-thornwood, the little basket of work-things, the toys for the
children:"--and then, after a watchful pause, "she is winding the
woollen thread round the doorposts. Ah! I see the marriage-cake: the
bridegroom presents the fire and water." Then, in a longer pause, was
heard the chorus, Thalassie! Thalassie! and for just a few moments, in
the strange light of many wax tapers at noonday, Marius could see them
both, side by side, while the bride was lifted over the doorstep:
Lucius Verus heated and handso