Perilla watched the two men as they walked off toward the apiary, and when she turned to her stepmother her eyes were wet with sudden tears.  “Fidus was almost impertinent to father, wasn’t he?  And father was so perfect to him!  That is what I tell Fidus, when he talks like grandfather and says we are all going to the dogs—­I tell him that at least we are keeping our manners as we go, which is more than can be said of the reformers.  I am always nervous when he and father get on to social questions, they feel so differently.  Fidus was quite angry with me the other day because I said I was thankful that we had learned to have some appreciation of taste and good form and elegance and that we should never go back to being boors and prudes.  He insisted that if by boors and prudes I meant men and women who cared more for courage and virtue than for ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘license,’ I should see them become the fashion again in Rome, before I knew it.  Augustus was not blindfolded, if he was old.  But, although Fidus doesn’t understand father, he does love him.  He said about coming here that he would rather spend his last day with father than with any other man in Rome.  And what a happy day it has been!”

Perilla rose impulsively and, tucking her sleeping child in among the cushions of a neighbouring bench, threw herself on the grass by the older woman.  Her forty-five years sat lightly upon Fabia, leaving her still lovely in the sensitive eyes of her husband and stepdaughter.  A temperamental equableness and a disciplined character gave to her finely modelled face an inward tranquillity which was a refuge to their ardent natures.  She only smiled now, as Perilla’s lively tongue began again:  “How happy you make father all the time!  It keeps me from feeling too dreadfully about going off to Africa.  Do you know, when you first came to us, I had an idea you wouldn’t understand him!  I was just old enough to realise that all your traditions were very austere ones, that your family belonged to the old order and had done wonderful things that weren’t poetry and the joy of living at all.  But I was far too young to understand that just because you did belong to people like that, when you married a man you would sink your life in his.  That seems to me now to be the strongest thing about you.  I have a feeling that inside you somewhere your character stands like a rock upon which father’s ideas could beat forever without changing it.  But you never let that character make you into a force separate from him.  You have made his home perfect in every detail, but outside of it you are just his wife.  Tell me, does that really satisfy you?”