“Cynthia’s wine,” he said.  “Do you expect to extract from the lees an ode to Augustus?”

Maecenas shrugged his shoulders.  “Probably,” he said, “he will write me a charming poem to explain why he cannot do what I ask.  I know the tricks of your tribe.”

With a final laugh and a clasp of the hands the friends parted company.  Maecenas went back to his library to reread dispatches from Spain before seeking his few hours of sleep.  Horace, finding that the wind had gone down, and tempted by the moonlight, turned toward the Subura to stroll for another hour among the Saturnalian crowds.

III

Propertius made his way past the slave at his own door, who was surprised only by his young master’s arrival before daybreak, and stumbled to his bedroom, where the night-lamp was burning.  The drinking at Cynthia’s—­he always thought of her by that name—­had been fast and furious.  She had been more beautiful than he had ever seen her.  Her eyes had shone like stars, and the garlands had hung down over her face and trailed in her cup of yellow wine.  And she had told him that he was the only true poet in Rome, and had read his poems aloud in a voice so sweet and clear that he had been nearly crazed with pride and delight.  Capriciously she had driven him away early with the other guests, but to-morrow he would see her again, or, perhaps, he could get through her door again to-night—­to-night—­

His feverish reverie was broken in upon by the frightened and apologetic porter, bringing a letter which his mistress had told him to deliver as soon as the master came home.  Propertius dismissed him angrily, and held the letter in an unwilling and shaking hand.  Perhaps he would not have read it at all if it had been written on an ordinary wax tablet.  But the little parchment roll had an unusual and insistent look about it, and he finally unrolled it and, holding it out as steadily as he could under the small wick of his lamp, read what was written:—­

“P.  Virgilius Maro to his Propertius, greeting.  I hope you will allow me to congratulate you on your recent volume of verse.  Your management of the elegiac metre, which my friend Gallus, before his tragic death, taught me to understand, seems to me ennobling and enriching, and in both the fire and the pathos of many of your lines I recognise the true poet.  Perhaps you will recognise the rustic in me when I add that I also welcomed a note of love for your Umbrian groves of beeches and pines and for water-meadows which you must have seen, perhaps by the banks of your Clitumnus, filled with white lilies and scarlet poppies.  Most of all have I been moved by the candour of your idealism.  It is rare indeed in this age to hear any scorn of the golden streams of Pactolus and the jewels of the Red Sea, of pictured tapestries and thresholds of Arabian onyx.  The knowledge that things like these are as nothing to you, compared with love, stirs me to gratitude.