“I think Paris knows what you think of him only too well,” resumed Myrrhina; “not but that he has a fair face of his own, and a lovely shape for dancing, though, to be sure, Placidus is a finer figure of a man. Oh! if you could have seen him this morning, madam, when he lay back so graceful in his chariot, and chid that pert lad of his for striking with his whip at the tall slave, who to be sure vanished like a flash of lightning, you would have said there wasn’t such another patrician in the whole city of Rome!”
“Enough of Placidus!” interrupted her mistress impatiently; “the subject wearies me. What of this tall slave, Myrrhina, who seems to have attracted your attention? Did he look like one of the barbarians my kinsman Licinius cries up so mightily? Is he handsome enough to step with my Liburnians, think you, under the day-litter?”
The waiting-maid’s eyes sparkled as she thought how pleasant it would be to have him in the same household as herself; and any little restraint she might have experienced in running over the personal advantages that had captivated her fancy disappeared before this agreeable prospect.
“Handsome enough, madam!” she exclaimed, removing the comb from her mouth, dropping her lady’s hair, and flourishing her hands with true Italian emphasis and rapidity,—“handsome enough! why he would make the Liburnians look like bald-headed vultures beside a golden eagle! Barbarian, like enough, he may be, Cimbrian, Frisian, Ansibarian, or what not, for I caught the foreign accent tripping on his tongue, and we have few men in Rome of stature equal to his. A neck like a tower of marble; arms and shoulders like the statue of Hercules yonder in the vestibule; a face, ay, twice as beautiful as Pericles on your medallion, with the [pg 27]golden curls clustering round a forehead as white as milk and eyes”—
Here Myrrhina stopped, a little at a loss for a simile, and a good deal out of breath besides.
“Go on,” said Valeria, who had been listening in an attitude of languid attention, her eyes half closed, her lips parted, and the colour deepening on her cheek. “What were his eyes like, Myrrhina?”
“Well, they were like the blue sky of Campania in the vintage; they were like the stones round the boss of your state-mantle; they were like the sea at noonday from the long walls of Ostia. And yet they flashed into sparks of fire when he looked at poor little Automedon. I wonder the boy wasn’t frightened! I am sure I should have been; only nothing frightens those impudent young charioteers.”
“Was he my kinsman’s slave; are you sure, Myrrhina?” said her mistress, in an accent of studied unconcern, and never moving a finger from her listless and comfortable attitude.
“No doubt of it, madam,” replied the waiting-maid; and would probably have continued to enlarge on the congenial subject, had she not been interrupted by the entrance of one of the damsels who had been summoned from the apartment, and returned to announce that Hippias, the retired gladiator, was in waiting—“Would Valeria take her fencing-lesson?”
But Valeria declined at once, and sat on before her mirror, without even raising her eyes to the tempting picture it displayed. Whatever was the subject of her thoughts, it must have been very engrossing, she seemed so loth to be disturbed.