Fabia’s smile grew into a laugh.  “I seem very old-fashioned to you, do I not, dear child?  It is not because of my age, either, for plenty of middle-aged women agree with you.  It is quite in the air, isn’t it, the independence of women, their right to choose their own paths?  I was invited to a reading of the Lysistrata the other day, and actually one woman said afterwards that she believed Aristophanes was only foreseeing a time when women would take part in the government!  She was laughed down for that, but most of the others agreed that the whole progress of society since Aristophanes’s time lay in the emancipation of women from the confines of the home and from intellectual servility.  I, too, believe in mental freedom, but you all insist a great deal upon the rights involved in being individuals.  I have never been able to see what you gain by that.  My husband is a citizen of Rome.  To be called his wife is my proudest title.  It makes no difference to the state what I am or do of myself.  I live to the state only through him.”

The younger woman had begun to speak almost before Fabia had finished, but the conversation was interrupted by the nurse coming for the child.  Perilla went back to the house with them, confessing, with a laugh, that an hour with her boy at bed-time was more important than trying to change her perfect mother.  It was not yet time to dress for the birthday dinner, which was to crown the day, and Fabia lingered on in the garden to watch the gathering rose in the late afternoon sky above the tree-tops.  An enchanted sense of happiness came to her in the silence of the hour.  She did not agree with her husband that happiness was the main object of life, but she was very grateful to the gods who had allowed her to be happy ever since she was a little girl, left to the care of a devoted uncle by parents she was too young to mourn.  The latter half of her life these gods had crowned with a love which made her youth immortal.  She had been married when she was a mere girl to a young soldier who had not lived long enough to obtrude upon her life more than a gentle memory of his bravery.  The bearing of a child had been the vital part of that marriage, and the child had come into her new home with her, leaving it only for a happy one of her own.  Her husband’s child had been like a second daughter to her, and throughout the twenty years of her life with Ovid joy had consistently outweighed all difficulties.  Insolent tongues had been busy with his faithlessness to her.  But after the first fears she had come to understand that, although other women often touched the poet and artist in him, none save herself knew the essential fidelity and the chivalrous tenderness of the husband.  She had accepted with pride his shining place in public regard.  It was no wonder that he loved Rome, for Rome loved him.