“You are doing the man an injustice; our dove has followed the lure of a dove-catcher who will not allow me to have her, and who is now billing and cooing with her in his own nest.  I am cheated, but I can scarcely be angry with the Roman, for his claim was of older standing than mine.”

“The Roman?” asked Cleopatra, rising from her seat and turning pale.  “But that is impossible.  You are making common cause with Eulaeus, and want to set me against Publius Scipio.  At the banquet last night you showed plainly enough your ill-feeling against him.”

“You seem to feel more warmly towards him.  But before I prove to you that I am neither lying nor joking, may I enquire what has this man, this many-named Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, to recommend him above any handsome well-grown Macedonian, who is resolute in my cause, in the whole corps of your body guard, excepting his patrician pride?  He is as bitter and ungenial as a sour apple, and all the very best that you—­a subtle thinker, a brilliant and cultivated philosopher—­can find to say is no more appreciated by his meanly cultivated intellect than the odes of Sappho by a Nubian boatman.”

“It is exactly for that,” cried the queen, “that I value him; he is different from all of us; we who—­how shall I express myself—­who always think at second-hand, and always set our foot in the rut trodden by the master of the school we adhere to; who squeeze our minds into the moulds that others have carved out, and when we speak hesitate to step beyond the outlines of those figures of rhetoric which we learned at school!  You have burst these bonds, but even your mighty spirit still shows traces of them.  Publius Scipio, on the contrary, thinks and sees and speaks with perfect independence, and his upright sense guides him to the truth without any trouble or special training.  His society revives me like the fresh air that I breathe when I come out into the open air from the temple filled with the smoke of incense—­like the milk and bread which a peasant offered us during our late excursion to the coast, after we had been living for a year on nothing but dainties.”

“He has all the admirable characteristics of a child!” interrupted Euergetes.  “And if that is all that appears estimable to you in the Roman your son may soon replace the great Cornelius.”

“Not soon! no, not till he shall have grown older than you are, and a man, a thorough man, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, for such a man is Publius!  I believe—­nay, I am sure—­that he is incapable of any mean action, that he could not be false in word or even in look, nor feign a sentiment be did not feel.”

“Why so vehement, sister?  So much zeal is quite unnecessary on this occasion!  You know well enough that I have my easy days, and that this excitement is not good for you; nor has the Roman deserved that you should be quite beside yourself for his sake.  The fellow dared in my presence to look at you as Paris might at Helen before he carried her off, and to drink out of your cup; and this morning he no doubt did not contradict what he conveyed to you last night with his eyes—­nay, perhaps by his words.  And yet, scarcely an hour before, he had been to the Necropolis to bear his sweetheart away from the temple of the gloomy Serapis into that of the smiling Eros.”