“Wooed in vain? No—yet it is almost the same thing. Does this contradiction seem to you an enigma? If you wish, you shall learn all—only not here, where the passers-by are growing more numerous and a listener might misuse my words. I have business on the northern slope of the Quirinal in about an hour—until then let us stay in my uncle Publius Calpurnius’ house, here on the right of the Patrician Way. He is Caius Decius’ guest to-day: we can walk up and down the portico undisturbed—and to be frank, I long to pour out my heart to you, receive your counsel.”
Bononius hesitated. He seemed to be secretly making a hasty calculation.
“Well,” he said at last, “if it won’t occupy too much time.... You won’t take it amiss, if I tell you that I, too, in an hour at latest....”
“Oh—I can explain everything in ten minutes.”
Turning to the right, he drew his friend along with him, and a short time after they knocked at the door of a spacious mansion. The porter drew back the bolt, bowed, and ushered the two youths through the passage into the atrium.
The residence of Publius Calpurnius was one of the huge, luxurious edifices, which seemed to vie in extent with the immense palaces erected by the emperor Diocletian in Salona and Nicomedia. Of no unusual external magnificence and with a moderate façade, it developed directly behind the atrium the most surprising size, stretching on the right and left over the ground naturally belonging to the neighboring houses and spreading towards the slope of the hill. Caius Bononius, who almost intentionally avoided the homes of Roman grandees, often as Lucius—at least in former days—had endeavored to draw his friend into the life and bustle of the capital, scanned with surprise and curiosity the magnificently-decorated structure, the halls of the two court-yards where a dozen gaily-clad slaves were just lighting the candelabra, the brilliant-hued paintings on the walls, the portrait-statues—men in somewhat un-Roman sleeved garments, and women with extremely realistic styles of hair-dressing which looked as if the latest coiffure of a fashionable visitor to the circus had served the sculptor for a model.
In fact, Lucius asserted that these styles of arranging the hair were removable, and could be taken from the statues’ heads and exchanged for modern ones as fashion required—a triumph of the plastic art, as he ironically added.
So they walked through the second pillared court-yard to the garden. The dusky avenues of trees, whose spreading boughs still permitted enough of the fading daylight to enter to reveal the box-bordered gravelled paths, invited thoughtful, pleasant strolls, and the watchman at the back of the house afforded a sufficient guarantee that no intruder would steal after the youths.