How terrible he had been to-day!  Dream of the dead, he had said, the dead!  And why had he talked of a hidden poison of which men might sicken and die?  She felt a silly desire to shriek, to strike her head against the painted wall, to tear the jewels from her ears.  The orange cat arched its back and rubbed its head against her.  She kicked it fiercely, and its snarl of pain seemed to bring her to her senses.  She picked the creature up and stroked it.  The bird in the cage broke into a mad little melody.  How morbid she was growing!  She had been depressed by her ridiculous dinner and Lucretius had been most unpleasant.  He was such a fool, too, in his idea of love.  The brevity of the heated hours was the flame’s best fuel.  Venus the Plunderer seemed to smile, and there quickened within her the desire for excitement, for the exercise of power, for the obliterating ecstasies of a fresh amour.  She had not had a lover since she accepted Catullus.  How the thought of that boy sickened her!  He had been so absurd that first day when she went to him at Allius’s.  After writing her that his heart was an AEtna of imprisoned fire, in the first moment he had reminded her of ice-cold Alps.  He had knelt and kissed her foot and then had kissed her lips—­her lips!—­as coolly as a father might kiss a child.  The unleashed passion, the lordly love-making which followed had won her.  But that first caress and its fellow at later meetings was like crystal water in strong wine—­she preferred hers unmixed.  Of a poet she had had enough for one while; if she ever wanted him back she need only say so.

In the mean time it would be a relief to play the game with a man who understood it.  Youth she enjoyed, if it were not too inexperienced.  Caelius’s smile, for instance, boyish and inviting, had seemed to her full of promise.  He was worth the winning and was close at hand.  Catullus had introduced him, which would add piquancy to her letting the din of the Forum succeed the babbling of Heliconian streams.  Suddenly she laughed aloud, cruelly, as another thought struck her.  How furious and how impotent Cicero would be!  If she could play with this disciple of his, and then divest him of every shred of reputation, she might feel that at last she was avenged on the man whom she had meant to marry (after they had sloughed off Metellus and Terentia) and who had escaped her.  Calling back her secretary she ordered writing materials and with her own hand wrote the following note: 

“Does Caelius know that Clodia’s roses are loveliest at dusk, when the first stars alone keep watch?”

III