"_Proh pudor_! Thy friend the Herod hath just been here with pagan oaths upon his lips about thy dullness. I tell thee it is hard enough to make him walk as he should, but a groaning comrade is a gravel in his shoe. If thou wouldst manage him, be merry. Remember we have this Herod to crown, though he stood on the Tarpeian Rock and sang sonnets in dishonor of Caesar." "By the certainty of Death, I have," he said sententiously. She looked at him and waited for him to go on, but he seemed to forget her, in his preoccupation. "I am a generous woman, Marsyas," she said softly. "I do not resent thy lack of confidence in me!" "Nay!" he exclaimed. "My lack of confidence, lady? What meanest thou?" "In thy bosom, gentle sir, thou keepest thine own counsel, and wearest signals of thy self-containment on thy brow. Wherefore, I am informed thou hast thoughts that I may not know!" "But I spare thee my sorrows, my cynicism, my hopelessness," he protested earnestly, "my disbelief in humankind." "O Marsyas, wert thou not Jewish, I should call thee unmanly. Listen!" She laid a warm hand, colored like a primrose, upon his. "Thou wast an anchorite; thou didst attain manhood's stature and mind as an anchorite; into the world thou camest with all an anchorite's slander of the poor world in thee. The eye is a spaniel; the tyrant Prejudice controls even its images. I warned thee in Alexandria. I confess that there is evil in the world, but it is more the work of an elementary impulse rather than calculation. Flaccus is bad, but because he is in love. Agrippa does foolhardy things, because he is ambitious. What? Did the preachment afflict thee which I delivered the other day upon thy levity and riotous living?" He shook his head. "Nay, but this moment's preachment crosses me," he said. "Thou offerest pardon for all the wickedness in the world, and I, sworn to punish one evil deed, am thus constrained, if I harken unto thee, to hold off my hand." "Now, thou approachest the deep-hidden secret which I may not know. Whom wilt thou punish? Flaccus or Classicus?" He hesitated. His vital hate of Saul of Tarsus, his fear for Lydia, his love and its deep wound, were things too close to the soul for him willingly to bring forth and display to this woman who acknowledged only a mind, and not a spirit. Yet it seemed unfair to withhold anything, however sacred, from one who had unbosomed so much to him. "I lead a selfish life and an unhappy one. I am stricken in my loves; one dead, one a murderer, a third faithless; a fourth I use to speed me in mine intents concerning the other two. If I avenge the death of one, I displease his spirit! If I visit punishment on his murderer, I make it possible for the destroyer of my love-story to go on. If I withhold my hand, I give another, much beloved, unto death. And him I help, I help for mine own use. My life is at cross purposes; my right hand worketh against the left!"