“But do you know, Chromatius—let us sit down in this lovely spot, where I remember there was a beautiful Bacchus—that all sorts of strange reports are going round the country, about your doings here?”
“Dear me! What are they? Do tell me.”
“Why, that you have a quantity of people living with you whom nobody knows; that you see no company, go out nowhere, and lead quite a philosophical sort of life, forming a most Platonic republic.”
“Highly flattered!” interrupted Chromatius, with a smile and bow.
“But that is not all,” continued Fabiola. “They say you keep most unfashionable hours, have no amusements, and live most abstemiously; in fact, almost starve yourselves.”
“But I hope they do us the justice to add, that we pay our way?” observed Chromatius. “They don’t say, do they, that we have a long score run up at the baker’s or grocer’s?”
“Oh, no!” replied Fabiola, laughing.
“How kind of them!” rejoined the good-humored old judge. “They—the whole public I mean—seem to take a wonderful interest in our concerns. But is it not strange, my dear young lady, that so long as my villa was on the free-and-easy system, with as much loose talk, deep drinking, occasional sallies of youthful mirth, and troublesome freaks in the neighborhood, as others,—I beg your pardon for alluding to such things; but, in fact, so long as I and my friends were neither temperate nor irreproachable, nobody gave himself the least trouble about us? But let a few people retire to live in quiet, be frugal, industrious, entirely removed from public affairs, and never even talk about politics or society, and at once there springs up a vulgar curiosity to know all about them, and a mean pruritus in third-rate statesmen to meddle with them; and there must needs fly about flocks of false reports and foul suspicions about their motives and manner of living. Is not this a phenomenon?”
“It is, indeed; but how do you account for it?”
“I can only do so by that faculty of little minds which makes them always jealous of any aims higher than their own; so that, almost unconsciously, they depreciate whatever they feel to be better than they dare aspire to.”