Amathusium renidens
Salis arbitræ et vaporis,
Flos siderum Dione!
On the faces of the gayest Epicureans could be seen something at once senile and puerile. Neither the fresh salt water of the sea bath nor the warm sulphurous springs of Baiæ could completely cure the bodies of these withered and chilly young men, bald and old at twenty, not through their own debauches, but through sins of their ancestors; youths on whom women, wisdom, and literature had begun to pall; witty and impotent young men, in whose veins ran the blood of too late a generation.
In one of the most flowery and pleasant nooks between Baiæ and Puteoli and under the dark slopes of the Apennine, rose the white marble walls of a villa.
Near the wide window, opening directly on the sea, so that from the chamber sky and sea alone were visible, Myrrha was lying on a bed.
The doctors had not understood her malady; but Arsinoë, who watched her sister day by day losing strength and vitality, had brought her from Rome to the sea-coast.
Notwithstanding her illness Myrrha would clean and arrange her chamber with her own hands, in imitation of nuns and hermits; and would herself bring water, and attempt to wash linen, and do her own cookery. For weeks, and to the very last stage of her illness, she obstinately refused to go to bed, spending whole nights in prayer. One day the terrified Arsinoë found a hair-shirt on the weak body of her sister. Myrrha had taken all articles of luxury from her little chamber, stripping it of curtains and ornaments, and leaving nothing but a bed and a coarse wooden crucifix. The bare-walled room was "her cell." She also fasted strictly and Arsinoë found it difficult to oppose the gentle obstinacy of her will.
From the life of Arsinoë all listlessness had disappeared. She wavered continually between hope of restoring Myrrha to health and despair at losing her. And although she could not love her sister more passionately than before, yet, dominated by the fear of their eternal separation, she understood her own love more clearly.
Sometimes, with motherly pity, Arsinoë would gaze upon that wasted face, and the little body in which so fierce a fire was burning. When the sick girl refused wine and food prescribed by the physician, Arsinoë would say in vexation—