Never be dearer to me even love of a mother beloved,
    Never an interest in life dear, if of thee I’m bereft. 
  Thou and thou only to me art my home, to me, Cynthia, only
    Father and mother art thou—­thou all my moments of joy.

He had, indeed, been affectionate toward her once more, and had made a point of telling her things that he thought would please her.  He had even, some days before, seemed boyishly eager for her sympathetic pleasure in an invitation to dine with Maecenas.

“I am made, mother,” he said, “if he takes me up.”

“Made!” she repeated now to herself.  Made into what?

A friend had told her that the Forum was ringing with the fame of this new writer, and that from the Palatine to the Subura his poetry was taking like wildfire.  She was dumb before such strange comfort.  What was this “fame” to which men were willing to sacrifice their citizenship?  Nothing in Rome had so shocked her as the laxity of family life, the reluctance of young men to marry, the frequency of divorce.  She had felt her first sympathy with Augustus when he had endeavoured to force through a law compelling honourable marriage.  Now, all that was best in her, all her loyalty to the traditions of her family, rose in revolt against a popular favour which applauded the rhymes of a ruined boy and admired the shameless revelations of debauchery.

These plain words, spoken to herself, acted upon her mind like a tonic.  In facing the facts at their worst, she gained courage to believe that there must still be something she could do, if she could only grow calmer and think more clearly.  She stopped her restless walking, and, taking a chair, forced herself to lean back and rest.  The afternoon was growing dark, and a servant was beginning to light the lamps.  In the glow of the little yellow flames Pan seemed to be piping a jocund melody.

The frenzy of despair left her, and she began to remember her son’s youth and the charming, boyish things about him.  Perhaps among his new friends some would love him and help him where she and his earlier friends had failed.  There was Virgil, for example.  He was older, but Propertius’s enthusiasm for him seemed unbounded.  He had pored over the Georgics when they came out, and only the other day he had told her that the poet was at work on an epic that would be greater than the Iliad.  The boy’s likes and dislikes were always violent, and he had said once, in his absurd way, that he would rather eat crumbs from Virgil’s table than loaves from Horace’s.

She knew that Virgil believed in noble things, and she had heard that he was kind and full of sympathy.  As the son of a peasant he did not seem too imposing to her.  He had been pointed out to her one day in the street, and the memory of his shy bearing and of the embarrassed flush on his face as he saw himself the object of interest, now gave her courage to think of appealing to him.