Upon the second fortnight of this life Quadratilla broke like a thunder-squall.  Whatever feelings had prompted her to leave her fashionable resort, her mood after she arrived was characteristically Bacchanal.  She had a genius for making the tenderest feeling or the deepest conviction seem absurd.  Rufus did not know whether to be more angry at her open hint to Pliny that his childlessness was like that of so many millionaires of the day, a voluntary lure for the attention of legacy hunters, or at her sardonic inquiries after Tacitus’s dyspepsia.  His best friends knew that his gloom issued from the travail of a mind which had sickened mortally under Domitian and could not find in the present tranquillity more than a brief interruption to the madness of men and the wrath of gods.  It was not that Quadratilla failed to perceive the massive intellectual force of Tacitus.  On the contrary, she enraged Rufus and the others still further by a covert irony about Pliny’s classing himself as a man of letters with the historian, an innocent vanity which endeared him only the more to those whose experience of his loyal and generous heart left no room for critical appraisement of his mental calibre.

The day in question had been full of small annoyances.  Calpurnia, wishing, on the Feast of Fors Fortuna, to excuse the dining-room servants from a noonday attendance, had had a luncheon served in the grotto of the tidal spring.  Unluckily, while they were testing the ebb and flow by putting rings and other small objects on a dry spot and watching the water cover them, Quadratilla lost out of one of her rings a very valuable emerald.  From that moment until the stone was returned by Marcus everybody’s patience had been strained to the breaking point by the old lady’s peevish temper.  After dinner, when they were sitting in the loggia overlooking the lake, which lay dark and still beneath the June stars, they all united in a tacit effort to divert her attention.  Pliny told a story of some neighbours to illustrate that the same kind of courage existed in the middle class as in the aristocracy.  A wife, finding that her husband was wasting away with an incurable disease, not only urged him to end his life, but joined him in the brave adventure, fastening his weakened body to hers and then leaping with him from a window overlooking the lake.

Fannia agreed enthusiastically that the deed was as brave as the one by which her famous grandmother had shown her husband the way to meet an emperor’s command to die; and she went on to say that she and Pliny had decided once that some of the unknown hours of Arria’s life were as courageous as the final one of death.  “Mother has told me all kinds of things about her,” she said.  “Once her husband and son were both desperately ill, and the son died.  It wasn’t safe to tell grandfather, and grandmother went through it all, even the funeral, without his knowing it.  She would go into his room and answer questions about the boy, saying he had slept well and eaten more.  When she couldn’t bear it any longer she would go to her own room and give way, and come back again, calm and serene, to nurse her husband.”