"Light-hearted eremite!" she chid. "Never a Jew but believed that all the happenings in the world happen in Jerusalem—that there is nothing else to come to pass after Jerusalem's full catalogue of possibilities is exhausted. But I tell thee that, compared to Rome, Jerusalem is an unwatered spot in the desert where once in a century a loping jackal passes by to break its eventlessness."
"Lady," he said with his old gravity, "Judea is a Roman province. Is Rome harsher to her citizens than she is with her subjugated peoples?"
"Thou art nearer the executive seat; under the eye of Power itself. Icarus, on his waxen wings, was unsafe enough in the daylight; but he was undone by soaring too close to the sun!"
"What shall I do, then?" he asked.
"Attach thyself to a power; get behind the buckler of another's strength!"
"Power is not offering its protection for nothing; what have I to give in exchange for it?"
Almost inadvertently, she let her eyes run over him, and seemed impelled to say the words that leaped to her lips. But she recovered herself in time.
"It is a generous world," she said, "and such as thou shall not go friendless; depend upon it!"
When Marsyas glanced up, his eyes rested on Lydia's, and for a moment he was held in silence by the faint darkening of distress that he saw there. Something wild and sweet and painful struggled in his breast and fell quiet so quickly that he sat with his lips parted and his gaze fixed until the alabarch's daughter dropped her eyes.
"I heard thee speak of Rome," she said. "After thy labor is done, wilt thou remain there?"