Gregory shook his head. "May the Lord pardon me if I am deceived," he said slowly, his piercing eye still on Julian. "But remember, Basil, how often the Devil himself, the father of lying, has appeared to men in guise of an angel!" XV On the base of a dolphin-shaped lamp were ranged the curling irons of a barber. The lamp-light was growing pale, for rays of morning, falling through silken window-curtains, were gradually filling the sleeping chamber with deep violet hues. The curtains were dyed in the richest hyacinthine purple of Tyre. "'Hypostasis,' 'hypostasis'? What is the meaning of the divine hypostasis, or essence, or personality, of the Trinity? No human being can form any conception. I myself haven't slept a wink in thinking over it the whole night. I arrived at no conclusion but an atrocious headache. Boy, give me towels and soap!" So spoke a personage with a tall headdress like a mitre and the pontifical aspect of a high-priest or Asiatic tyrant. He was chief barber and wig-maker in attendance on the sacred person of Constantius. The razor in his skilful hands was flitting, with an incomparable grace and lightness, over the Imperial chin. He was engaged upon a sacred mystery. In attendance on each side were innumerable _cubicularii_, slaves holding vases, essences, oils, and napkins, and two youths bearing fans. Supervising all these, Eusebius, grand chamberlain of the private apartments, stood by. He was the most powerful man in the Empire. During the ceremony of barbification, as an emperor's shaving must be called, the two youths refreshed the illustrious patient by means of great fans, each six-winged like the seraphim, or the _ripides_ with which deacons fan away flies from a sacramental chalice, during the intoning of the liturgy. The barber had scarcely finished the Emperor's right cheek and was beginning the left, which had been anointed with an Arabian essence named "the foam of Aphrodite." Leaning to the ear of Constantius he whispered cautiously: "Ah! Well-beloved of God, your universal intelligence alone can determine what this hypostasis, this mysterious personality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost may mean. Don't listen to the bishops! Act as pleases yourself, and not as it may please them. But Athanasius, that patriarch of Alexandria, must be punished as a blasphemous rebel. Almighty God, the Creator Himself, will instruct your Holiness as to what, and in what manner, your subjects ought to believe. In my humble opinion the Arians are perfectly right in asserting that there was a time when the 'Son' did not exist. And so consubstantiality...." But at this moment Constantius was staring at himself in the great polished silver mirror, and rubbing his hand over the silky new shaven region on his right cheek. He interrupted-- "I don't think that's very smooth!--eh! I think you might go over it again. What were you saying to me about consubstantiality?"