At last the wedding day dawned, and the great palace was all humming with joyous excitement. Her mother came into Cecilia’s room to dress her for her marriage. Her beautiful hair was braided in six long strands, in imitation of that of the Vestal Virgins; her family had always clung to the high ideals of ancient Rome, and no taint from the deluge of luxury and vice in which the Empire was plunged had ever penetrated into their sternly guarded homes. In daily life we are told that Cecilia went clothed, like other patrician ladies, in garments richly embroidered with gold, but on this, the day of her wedding, her mother put upon her a robe of plain home-spun wool spotlessly white, copied from the one woven by her ancestress, Caia Cecilia, hundreds of years before, and which was the original tunic, the model upon which woman’s costume was founded for something like a thousand years afterwards. Good Roman women still looked upon the wise and simple Tanaquil as their pattern in all the matters of domestic life, and at the period of which we are speaking the Etrurian Queen’s spindle and distaff were still preserved among the sacred insignia of the city. A white woollen girdle, like Queen Tanaquil’s, was bound round Cecilia’s waist, and then she was shrouded in the flame-coloured veil with which every Roman girl, noble or simple, covered her face and head when she went to meet her bridegroom. The veil not only signified maiden modesty, but denoted the firm constancy with which the bride was prepared to cling to her husband. It was originally the badge of the women of the Flaminia, a race which, some four hundred years before St. Cecilia’s day, held the Catholic belief as to the inviolability of marriage, and prohibited divorce. The “Flammeum,” as the flame-coloured veil was called, remained, for this reason, in use at Christian weddings, until, at any rate, the Fourth Century, when St. Ambrose spoke of it in his treatise on “Virginity.” But Cecilia’s marriage was a purely pagan ceremony, the first at which she had ever been obliged to assist. Wine and milk were offered to the gods, and she raised her heart to the one true God, renewing the offer of her whole being to Him; the cake, “the symbol of alliance,” was broken and shared, her hand was placed in the hand of her ardent bridegroom, and they were now man and wife. As the sun sank behind the Janiculum Hill, the bride was conducted, with great pomp and rejoicing, to the dwelling of her husband, across the Tiber, now the Church of St. Cecilia in Trastevere that we all know so well.