"May we depend on you?" he asked. He laid a hand on Galen's shoulder, bending over him.
"I am an old man," Galen answered. "In any event I have not long to live. I will do my best—for you."
Pertinax nodded, but there was still a question in his mind. He bade farewell to Marcia, turning his back toward Galen. Marcia whispered:
"Be a man now, Pertinax! If we should lose this main, we two can drink the stuff that Galen brings."
"There was a falling star last night," said Pertinax. "Whose was it?"
Marcia studied his face a moment. Then:
"There will be a rising sun tomorrow!" she retorted. "Whose will it be?
Yours! Play the man!"
XI. GALEN
Galen's house was one he rented from a freedman of the emperor—a wise means of retaining favor at the palace. Landlords having influence were careful to protect good tenants. Furthermore, whoever rented, rather than possessed, escaped more easily from persecution. Galen, like Tyanan Apollonius, reduced his private needs, maintaining that philosophy went hand in hand with medicine, but wealth with neither.
It was a pleasant little house, not far away from Cornificia's, within a precinct that was rebuilt after all that part of Rome burned under Nero's fascinated gaze. The street was crescent-shaped, not often crowded, though a score of passages like wheel-spokes led to it; and to the rear of Galen's house was a veritable maze of alleys. There were two gates to the house: one wide, with decorated posts, that faced the crescent street, where Galen's oldest slave sat on a stool and blinked at passers-by; the other narrow, leading from a little high-walled courtyard at the rear into an alley between stables in which milch-asses were kept. That alley led into another where a dozen midwives had their names and claims to excellency painted on the doors—an alley carefully to be avoided, because women of that trade, like barbers, vied for custom by disseminating gossip.