Quid faciant leges, ubi sola pecunia regnat,
Aut ubi paupertus vincere nulla potent?
Ipri, qui cynica traducunt tempora cœna,
Nonnum quum nummis vendere verba solent.
Ergo judicium nihil est, nisi publica muces,
Atque equis, in caussa qui redet, emtor probat.
So sang Petronius, and so sing I.
——
SECTION XI.
The fair widow moved into her father’s house, and carried joy with her, and smiles, and a new life. The dusty halls and silent chambers were soon made glad, and gave no echo back to the busy feet which beat their floors in measured tread to the sound of lutes. Men wondered at the miser’s transformation, and the jolly sun, driving up the clear, blue, vaulted roof of the earth, looked in upon curtains, and mirrors, and rich carpets, and all the bought luxury of great wealth, and danced upon the draped walls, and laughed, and wondered too. But the change was of the surface. The miser loved his daughter with his whole soul; he loved gold with more than his whole soul—gold, his first love—and the daughter held a divided and an inferior empire in his affections. The miser loved his daughter as he best might, with his heart of shining metal, and he would have loved her had she been less than what she was; less beautiful, less worthy, less full of the love which flowed from her like a sea, and covered him, and he drank of it, a joy he had never known. He loved her, as the heir to his vast estates, as himself renewed, to bear his labor onward, to accumulate through still another span of life; and he showed her to the world, and took pride in this new glory, as a new title to his possessions, which was to carry them with himself, even beyond the grave.