The Vestal’s pure simple life had left its impress on her features.  Peace and innocent delight in innocent things shone through her dark eyes and soft, well-rounded face.  Her light brown hair was covered and confined by a fillet of white wool.[50] She wore a stola and outer garment of stainless white linen—­the perfectly plain badge of her chaste and holy office; while on her small feet were dainty sandals, bound on by thongs of whitened leather.  Everything about her dress and features betokened the priestess of a gentle religion.

  [50] Infula.

When questions and repeated salutations were over, and Livia had ceased to be too afraid of her quite strange brother, Fabia asked what she could do for her nephew.  As one of the senior Vestals, her time was quite her own.  “Would he like to have her go out with him to visit friends, or go shopping?  Or could she do anything to aid him about ordering frescoers and carpenters for the old Praeneste villa?”

This last was precisely what Drusus had had in mind.  And so forth aunt and nephew sallied.  Some of the streets they visited were so narrow that they had to send back even their litters; but everywhere the crowds bowed such deference and respect to the Vestal’s white robes that their progress was easy.  Drusus soon had given his orders to cabinet-makers and selected the frescoer’s designs.  It remained to purchase Cornelia’s slave-boy.  He wanted not merely an attractive serving-lad, but one whose intelligence and probity could be relied upon; and in the dealers’ stalls not one of the dark orientals, although all had around their necks tablets with long lists of encomiums, promised conscience or character.  Drusus visited, several very choice boys that were exhibited in separate rooms, at fancy prices, but none of these pretty Greeks or Asiatics seemed promising.

Deeply disgusted, he led Fabia away from the slave-market.

“I will try to-morrow,” he said, vexed at his defeat.  “I need a new toga.  Let us go to the shop on the Clivus Suburanus; there used to be a good woollen merchant, Lucius Marius, on the way to the Porta Esquilina.”

Accordingly the two went on in the direction indicated; but at the spot where the Clivus Suburanus was cut by the Vicus Longus, there was so dense a crowd and so loud a hubbub, that their attendants could not clear a way.  For a time it was impossible to see what was the matter.  Street gamins were howling, and idle slaves and hucksters were pouring forth volleys of taunts and derision at some luckless wight.

“Away with them! the whip-scoundrel! Verbero!"[51] yelled a lusty produce-vender.  “Lash him again!  Tan his hide for him!  Don’t you enjoy it?  Not accustomed to such rough handling, eh! my pretty sparrow?”

  [51] A coarse epithet.

Fabia without the least hesitation thrust herself into the dirty-robed, foul-mouthed crowd.  At sight of the Vestal’s white dress and fillets the pack gave way before her, as a swarm of gnats at the wave of a hand.  Drusus strode at her heels.