"It's too hot to stand here in the sun," said Eugenia very sensibly.
They passed on, over heaps of ancient refuse, into the ruins of the myriad-celled palace of the Cæsars, silent now, not an echo left of all the humming, poisonous intrigues that had filled it full.
"Here," said Mr. Livingstone, stopping in a vaulted, half-wrecked chamber, ostensibly to comment on things, really to get his breath after the climb, "here in such a room, only lined and paved with priceless marbles, and hung with Asiatic silks, here you lay at ease in an embroidered toga on a gold-mounted couch, and clapped your hands for a slave to bring you your Falernian wine, cooled with snow from Monte Cavo,—that was the life!"
"I thought it was in the Arabian Nights you clapped your hands for a slave," said Eugenia.
"In Rome you probably cracked a whip," suggested Mr. Crittenden. "But I bet you a nickel it didn't make any difference what you did, your slave came when he got good and ready and brought you another kind of wine from the one you ordered—and lukewarm at that. They'd probably used up all the Monte Cavo snow to cool the wine down in the slaves' hall."
"What possible basis have you for saying all that?" cried Mr. Livingstone, exasperated.
"That's the way things are! Folks that try to use slave labor always get what's coming to them in the way of poor service."
"Oh, but in Rome you had the right to kill him!" cried Mr. Livingstone, jealous of his rights.
"Sure you could kill him—and in New York you can fire your stenographer. What good would that do you? You couldn't get intelligent service out of the next slave either, unless you had him educated to be intelligent, and if you did that he'd be such a rare bird that you'd save him for something better than standing around waiting for you to clap your hands at him. He'd be running your business for you."
"Oh, pshaw, Crittenden, why be so heavy-handed and literal! Why wet-blanket every imaginative fancy?"