Gleva: He spoke the truth.
Calpurnius: The truth! (Contemptuously.) There's a word for you! Child! There's a greater thing in the world than truth. Truth wins no battles.
Gleva: What's this greater thing?
Calpurnius: Discipline! You should have struck.
Gleva: I wish I had. For he might have struck back.
Calpurnius: Discipline! So I go with my legion.
Gleva (with a cry accusingly): You want to go.
Calpurnius (springs up): By all the gods I do. For ten years I have toiled in Britain building roads--roads--roads--till I'm sick of them. First the pounded earth, then the small stones, next the rubble, then the concrete, and last of all the pavement; here in Anderida, there across the swamps to Londinium, northwards through the fens to Eboracum--ten years of it. And now--Rome--the mother of me!
Gleva: Rome? (She speaks despairingly. Calpurnius has forgotten her: he answers her voice, not her.)
Calpurnius: Just for a little while. Oh, I shall go out again, but just for a little while--to rise when I want to, not at the trumpet's call, the house all quiet till I clap my hands--to have one's mornings free--to saunter through the streets, picking up the last new thing of Juvenal in the Argiletum, or some fine piece of Corinthian bronze in the Campus Martius, and stopping on the steps of the Appian Way to send a basket of flowers or a bottle of new scent to some girl that has caught one's fancy. To go to the theatre, and see the new play, though, to be sure, people write to me that there are no plays nowadays.