"And you, O Adorable, Calypso, Circe, Nausicaä, Medēa,—what shall I call you?—you will not be angry if I call to see you to-morrow?" said Ahenobarbus, smiling as he parted from Cornelia.
"If you come," was her response, "I shall not perhaps order the slaves to pitch you out heels over head."
"Ah! That is a guarded assent, indeed," laughed Lucius, "but farewell, pulcherrima!"[94]
Cornelia that night lay down and sobbed herself to sleep. Her mother had congratulated her on her brilliant social success at the dinner-party, and had praised her for treating Lucius Ahenobarbus as she had.
"You know, my dear," the worthy woman had concluded, "that since it has seemed necessary to break off with Drusus, a marriage with Lucius would be at once recommended by your father's will, and in many ways highly desirable."
II
Only a very few days later Lucius Ahenobarbus received a message bidding him come to see his father at the family palace on the Palatine. Lucius had almost cut himself clear from his relations. He had his own bachelor apartments, and Domitius had been glad to have him out of the way. A sort of fiction existed that he was legally under the patria potestas,[95] and could only have debts and assets on his father's responsibility, but as a matter of fact his parent seldom paid him any attention; and only called on him to report at home when there was a public or family festival, or something very important. Consequently he knew that matters serious were on foot, when he read in his father's note a request to visit Domitius's palace as soon as convenient. Lucius was just starting, in his most spotless toga,—after a prolonged season with his hairdresser,—to pay a morning call on Cornelia, and so he was the more vexed and perturbed.
"Curses on Cato,[96] my old uncle," he muttered, while he waited in the splendid atrium of the house of the Ahenobarbi. "He has been rating my father about my pranks with Gabinius and Læca, and something unpleasant is in store for me."
Domitius presently appeared, and his son soon noticed by the affable yet diplomatic manner of his father, and the gentle warmth of his greeting, that although there was something in the background, it was not necessarily very disagreeable.
"My dear Lucius," began Domitius, after the first civilities were over, and the father and son had strolled into a handsomely appointed library and taken seats on a deeply upholstered couch, "I have, I think, been an indulgent parent. But I must tell you, I have heard some very bad stories of late about your manner of life."