Valerian drew deep breath. “How sweet it is to be at home!... Who first thought of home deserves well!”
“It is sweet.... Valerian, the captives, the miserable in the arena the other day! A kind of captivity and misery to be the watchers....”
“Have you felt that? I have felt it too. But not one man nor many men can change the world.... A man would be torn to pieces who said to the people, ‘The games are done with, things of the past!’”
“Yes.... Ill customs perhaps ignorantly begun, and we go on because we have gone on so long.... Yet are we never to end ill, begin better?”
“In the long, long run, perhaps, yes.... I suppose we all sleep, or are poisoned.... However, I said to myself, there in the Amphitheatre, ‘When needs must, I will go to these games, but not for pleasure. But not again, though I become thrice as rich as I am, shall I furnish them!’”
“I am glad of that.—See Flavia’s grey dove in the almond tree!”
They watched the dove. It rose, showed dark against the carmine sky, then passed into the black depths of a cypress.
“Cease now to mourn for Flavia,” said Valerian. “She will be happy.”
“Perhaps.... Men love children, I know, but hardly as women love them.”
“Nature allows that. But a man may do wisely by his children.”