Clin. (apart.) Do you ask what it is? Why, don’t you see? Attendants, jewels of gold, and clothes, her too, whom I left here with only one little servant girl. Whence do you suppose that they come?
Clit. (apart.) Oh! now at last I understand you.
Syr. (to himself.) Good Gods! what a multitude there is! Our house will hardly hold them, I’m sure. How much they will eat! how much they will drink! what will there be more wretched than our old gentleman? (Catching sight of Clinia and Clitipho.) But look, I espy the persons I was wanting.
Clin. (apart.) Oh Jupiter! Why, where is fidelity gone? While I, distractedly wandering, have abandoned my country for your sake, you, in the mean time, Antiphila, have been enriching yourself, and have forsaken me in these troubles, you for whose sake I am in extreme disgrace, and have been disobedient to my father; on whose account I am now ashamed and grieved, that he who used to lecture me about the manners of these women, advised me in vain, and was not able to wean me away from her:—which, however, I shall now do; whereas when it might have been advantageous to me to do so, I was unwilling. There is no being more wretched than I.
Syr. (to himself.) He certainly has been misled by our words which we have been speaking here. (Aloud.) Clinia, you imagine your mistress quite different from what she really is. For both her mode of life is the same, and her disposition toward you is the same as it always was; so far as we could form a judgment from the circumstances themselves.
Clin. How so, prithee? For nothing in the world could I rather wish for just now, than that I have suspected this without reason.
Syr. This, in the first place, then (that you may not be ignorant of any thing that concerns her); the old woman, who was formerly said to be her mother, was not so.—She is dead: this I overheard by accident from her, as we came along, while she was telling the other one.
Clit. Pray, who is the other one?
Syr. Stay; what I have begun I wish first to relate. Clitipho; I shall come to that afterward.
Clit. Make haste, then.