"Charmingly said, Mamertinus! Say it again, I beg, before you've forgotten it! I'll write that down with the other maxims," declared Lampridius, the professor of eloquence, taking tablets from his pocket. His admired friend Mamertinus was a fashionable Athenian advocate. "My dear fellow, I say," repeated Mamertinus with the most delicate of smiles, "I merely say that men have been sent by the gods----" "No, no, it didn't run so, Mamertinus; you put it better. The gods created mortals----" "Ah, yes; the gods created mortals for one purpose only--polite conversation!" And the enthusiastic Lampridius scribbled down the words as if they had been the utterance of an oracle. The scene was a friendly supper of men of letters given by the venerable Roman senator Hortensius, in the villa of his rich young ward Arsinoë, not far from the Piræus. Mamertinus on that day had achieved a remarkable speech in defence of the banker Barnava. Nobody had the smallest doubt that Barnava was a complete scoundrel; but, besides measureless eloquence, the advocate possessed so telling a voice that one of the innumerable ladies who adored him avowed: "I never listen to what Mamertinus says; I have no wish to know what he's talking about. I become intoxicated with the tones of his voice, and especially with the dying cadence at the end of his periods. It is incredible! It is no longer a human voice, but nectar and ambrosia, the heavenly sighing of an Æolian harp!" And so, while the populace labelled the money-lender Barnava "the blood-sucker," the devourer of widows and orphans, the Athenian judges enthusiastically acquitted the client of Mamertinus. From this client the advocate had received 50,000 sesterces, and therefore felt in no dissatisfied mood at the supper given by Hortensius in his honour. But it was his habit to affect the invalid, in order that he might be spoiled and petted the more. "I am utterly done up to-day, my friends," he murmured plaintively; "aching in every limb. Where is Arsinoë?" "She will soon be here. Arsinoë has just received from the museum of Alexandria some new apparatus for experiments in physics; and she is entirely absorbed in them. But I will give an order to summon her," suggested Hortensius. "No, don't do that," responded the lawyer carelessly. "But what a ridiculous thing--a young girl at physics! What in the world has the one thing to do with the other? Your blue-stockings have been finely belaboured by Aristophanes and Euripides. Arsinoë is a whimsical creature, Hortensius! Really, if she wasn't so attractive, what with her sculpture and her mathematics she would almost become----" He did not finish the sentence, and gazed languidly out of the window. "What am I to do?" replied Hortensius. "A spoiled child ... an orphan; no father, no mother! As her mere tutor, I can't well deny her anything." "I see, I see." The lawyer was no longer listening; he was thinking about himself. "My dear fellows, I feel----"