“It is a little eternity--is it not, Titianus, that we have been discussing state affairs? You all know how frank I am and that I cannot be silent when I meet with perverse opinions. While you have been away I have had much to hear and to say; it would have exhausted the strength of the strongest. I only wonder you don’t find me more worn out, for what can be more excruciating for a woman, that to be obliged to enter the lists for manly decisiveness against a man who is defending a perfectly antagonistic view? Give me water, Leukippe.” While the Empress drank the syrup with tiny sips twitching her thin lips over it, Verus went up to the prefect and asked him in an under tone: “You were a long while alone with Sabina, cousin?” “Yes,” replied Titianus, and he set his teeth as he spoke and clenched his fist so hard that the praetor could not misunderstand, and replied in a low voice: “She is much to be pitied, and particularly just now she has hours--” “What sort of hours?” asked Sabina taking the cup from her lips. “These,” replied Verus quickly, “in which I am not obliged to occupy myself in the senate or with the affairs of state. To whom do I owe them but to you?” With these words he approached the mature beauty, and taking the goblet out of her hand with affectionate subservience, as a son might wait on his honored and suffering mother, he gave it to the Greek slave. The Empress bowed her thanks again and again to the praetor with much affability, and then said, with a slight infusion of cheerfulness in her tones: “Well--and what is there to be seen at Lochias?” “Wonderful things,” answered Balbilla readily and clasping her little hands. “A swarm of bees, a colony of ants, have taken possession of the palace. Hands black, white and brown--more than we could count, are busy there and of all the hundreds of workmen which are astir there, not one got in the way of another, for one little man orders and manages them all, just as the prescient wisdom of the gods guides the stars through the ‘gracious and merciful night’ so that they may never push or run against each other.” “I must put in a word on behalf of Pontius the architect,” interposed Verus. “He is a man of at least average height.” “Let us admit it to satisfy your sense of justice,” returned Balbilla. “Let us admit it--a man of average height, with a papyrus-roll in his right-hand and a stylus in the left, controls them. Now, does my way of stating it please you better?” “It can never displease me,” answered the praetor. “Let Balbilla go on with her story,” commanded the Empress. “What we saw was chaos,” continued the girl, “still in the confusion we could divine the elements of an orderly creation in the future; nay, it was even visible to the eye.” “And not unfrequently stumbled over with the foot,” laughed the praetor. “If it had been dark, and if the laborers had been worms, we must have trodden half of them to death--they swarmed so all over the pavement.”