“Did you know him?” I never accepted, literally, Clarissa’s unique age: two thousand years is an unlikely span of life even for a woman of her sturdy unimaginativeness; yet there was no ignoring the fact that she _seemed_ to have lived that long, and that her references to obscure episodes, where ascertainable, were nearly always right and, more convincing still, where they differed from history’s records, differed on the side of plausibility ... the work of a memory or a mind completely unsuperstitious and unenthusiastic: (she _was_ literal; she was, excepting always her central fantasy, matter-of-fact. To her the death or Caesar was the logical outcome of a system of taxation which has not been preserved for us except in quaintly obscure references; while the virtue of the Roman republic and the ambitions of celebrated politicians, she set aside as being of only minor importance: currency and taxation were her forte and she managed to reduce all the martial splendor of ancient days to an economic level). She had one other obsession, however, and my reference to Ammianus reminded her of it. “The Christians!” she exclaimed significantly; then she paused; I waited. Her conversation at times resembled chapter-headings chosen haphazardly from an assortment of Victorial novels. “_They_ hated him.” “Ammianus?” “No, your man Julian. It _is_ the Emperor Julian you are writing about.” “Reading about.” “Ah, you _will_ write about him,” she said with an abstracted pythoness stare which suggested that I was indefatigable in my eccentric purpose which, for some years, had been the study of history in a minor key. “Of course they hated him. As well they should have ... that’s the whole point to my work.” “Unreliable, the lot of them. There is no decent history from the time they came to Rome up until that fat little Englishman ... you know, the one who lived in Switzerland ... with rather _staring_ eyes.” “Gibbon.” “Yes, that one. Of course he got all the facts wrong, poor man, but at least he tried. The facts of course were all gone by then. They saw to that ... burning things, rewriting things ... not that I really ever _read_ them ... you know how I am about reading: I prefer a mystery novel any day. But at least Gibbon got the tone right.” “Yet....” “Of course Julian was something of a prig, you know. He _posed_ continually and he wasn’t ... what do they call him now? an apostate. He _never_ renounced Christianity.” “He what ...” Clarissa in her queer way took pleasure in rearranging all accepted information. I shall never know whether she did it deliberately to mystify or whether her versions were, in fact, the forgotten reality. “He was a perfectly good Christian _au fond_ despite his peculiar diet. He was a vegetarian for some years but wouldn’t eat beans, as I recall, because he thought they contained the souls of the dead, an old orphic notion.” “Which is hardly Christian.”