“You men never do observe what hurts us women.  Our Verus is the only man who can feel and understand—­who can divine it, as I might say.  There are five and thirty doors in my rooms!  I had them counted-five and thirty!  If they were not old and made of valuable wood I should really believe they had been made as a practical joke on me.”

“Some of them might be supplemented with curtains.”

“Oh! never mind—­a few miseries, more or less in any life do not matter.  Are the Alexandrians ready at last with their preparations?”

“I am sure I hope so,” said the prefect with a sigh.  They are bent on giving all that is their best; but in the endeavor to outvie each other every one is at war with his neighbor, and I still feel the effects of the odious wrangling which I have had to listen to for hours, and that I have been obliged to check again and again with threats of ’I shall be down upon you.’”

“Indeed,” said the Empress with a pinched smile, as if she had heard some thing that pleased her.

“Tell me something about your meeting.  I am bored to death, for Verus, Balbilla and the others have asked for leave of absence that they may go to inspect the work doing at Lochias; I am accustomed to find that people would rather be any where than with me.  Can I wonder then that my presence is not enough to enable a friend of my husband’s to forget a little annoyance—­the impression left by some slight misunderstanding?  But my fugitives are a long time away; there must be a great deal that is beautiful to be seen at Lochias.”

The prefect suppressed his annoyance and did not express his anxiety lest the architect and his assistants should be disturbed, but began in the tone of the messenger in a tragedy: 

“The first quarrel was fought over the order of the procession.”

“Sit a little farther off,” said Sabina pressing her jewelled right-hand on her ear, as if she were suffering a pain in it.  The prefect colored slightly, but he obeyed the desire of Caesar’s wife and went on with his story, pitching his voice in a somewhat lower key than before: 

“Well, it was about the procession, that the first breach of the peace arose.”

“I have heard that once already,” replied the lady, yawning.  “I like processions.”

“But,” said the prefect, a man in the beginning of the sixties—­and he spoke with some irritation, “here as in Rome and every where else, where they are not controlled by the absolute will of a single individual, processions are the children of strife, and they bring forth strife, even when they are planned in honor of a festival of Peace.”

“It seems to annoy you that they should be organized in honor of Hadrian?”

“You are in jest; it is precisely because I care particularly that they should be carried out with all possible splendor, that I am troubling myself about them in person, even as to details; and to my great satisfaction I have been able even to subdue the most obstinate; still it was scarcely my duty—­”