“You look like Quintus Livius Drusus, the Roman soldier,” said Cornelia, “and I would not have you otherwise than what you are.”

“Eho!” replied Drusus, passing his hand over her hair.  “Do you want me to tell you something?”

“What is it?” said Cornelia, pressing closer.

“I can never write a cosmology.  I shall never be able to evolve a new system of ethics.  I cannot improve on Plato’s ideal state.  I know I am a very ignorant man, with only a few ideas worth uttering, with a hand that is very heavy, with a mind that works to little purpose save when it deals with politics and war.  In short”—­and Drusus’s voice grew really pathetic—­“all my learning carries me no farther than did the wisdom of Socrates, ‘I know that I know nothing;’ and I have no time to spend in advancing beyond that stage.”

“But Socrates,” said Cornelia, laughing, “was the wisest man in Greece, and for that very reason.”

“Well,” said Drusus, ignoring the compliment, as a certain type of men will when the mood is on them, “what do you wish me to make of myself?”

“I wish you to make nothing different,” was her reply, “for you are precisely what I have always wanted you to be.  When you have read as much as I have,” this with an air of utter weariness, “you will realize the futility of philosophic study.”

“Eho!” remarked Drusus again.  “So you would have me feel that I am turning my back on nothing very great, after all?”

“And so I mean.”

“Seriously?”

“I am serious, Quintus.”  And indeed Cornelia was.  “I can read Aristotle and Plato, and Zeno and Cleanthes, and Pyrrho, and a score of others.  I can spin out of my own brain a hundred theories of the universe as good as theirs, but my heart will not be the happier, if things outside make me sad.  I am sick of the learning that is no learning, that answers our questions by other questions that are more riddling.”

“Ah, scoffer at the wise,” laughed Drusus, “what do you wish, then?” He spoke in Greek.

“Speak in Latin, in Latin, Quintus,” was her retort.  “I am weary of this fine, sweet language that tinkles so delicately, every word of which hides a hundred meanings, every sentence attuned like the notes for a harp.  Let us have our own language, blunt and to the point; the language, not of men who wonder what they ought to do, but who do.  We are Romans, not Greeks.  We have to rule the world, not growl as to how Jupiter made it.  When you came back from Athens I said, ’I love Quintus Drusus, but I would love him more if he were less a Hellene.’  And, now I see you wholly Roman, I love you wholly.  And for myself, I wish neither to be a Sappho, nor an Aspasia, nor a Semiramis, but Cornelia the Roman matron, who obeys her husband, Quintus Drusus, who cares for his house, and whom, in turn, her household fears and obeys.”

“O tempora!  O mores!” cried the young soldier, in delight.  “When had ever a woman such ambition in these degenerate days? Eu! Then I will burn my books, if you can get no profit out of them.”