“It follows, Valerian.”
“It is theory! It has never been, nor will it ever be. As we cannot free the slaves, so women cannot walk equal with men. But goodness to slaves, goodness and love to women I grant!”
Faustus was silent.
Said Valeria, “That is much to grant, but not enough.”
They were standing beneath a high-raised marble figure of Ceres. Valerian struck with his hand the base of the statue. His brow darkened. “O, Valeria, you and I have struggled together before now—struggled long, struggled hard! Now we are at peace. I value peace. Let us stay there!”
“You make a slavery and call it peace!”
He stamped with his foot. “Let it be! Let it be!”
The wife raised her arms to the skies, then let them drop. She could sing most sweetly. Now, suddenly, she broke into song, a wild folk-carol of sun and earth and gods and dæmons. She sang a charmed silence upon the terrace and the garden below. Tree, vine, and flower, bird upon the bough, light in the west, seemed to dream, listening. Faustus sat upon a bench, his hands crossed over his staff, his eyes upon the brightening evening star. Valerian sighed. He leaned against the wall and shadowed his face with his hand, and the inward light beat against the inward eye, but the eye was not yet strengthened enough to receive it strongly. The woman ceased to sing, the dusk thickened, the dank and chill of the evening were felt, they went into the house.
Later, in the great chamber, the house master and mistress being alone for the night, Valeria standing trimming the lamp that burned, fed by perfumed oil, before the little figures of the household deities, said suddenly, “She was your child—that lovely brown-haired one a woman thrust before us, leaving the Amphitheatre. She was so like you!—more like than is Flavia.”
Valerian came and stood beside her. “The woman was Lais the Greek. Five years since I freed her, and bought for her a flower shop. Then we became as strangers. Thou knowest that illness I had, five years ago, and how, recovering, I changed much in my life.... The freedwoman has her shop of flowers, and if I remember her aright will be ever warm and kind to the child.”