“You shall prove this!” cried the queen in great excitement.  “Publius is my friend—­”

“And I am yours!”

“You have often proved the reverse, and now again with lies and cheating—­”

“You seem,” interrupted Euergetes, “to have learned from your unphilosophical favorite to express your indignation with extraordinary frankness; to-day however I am, as I have said, as gentle as a kitten—­”

“Euergetes and gentleness!” cried Cleopatra with a forced laugh.  “No, you only step softly like a cat when she is watching a bird, and your gentleness covers some ruthless scheme, which we shall find out soon enough to our cost.  You have been talking with Eulaeus to-day; Eulaeus, who fears and hates Publius, and it seems to me that you have hatched some conspiracy against him; but if you dare to cast a single stone in his path, to touch a single hair of his head, I will show you that even a weak woman can be terrible.  Nemesis and the Erinnyes from Alecto to Megaera, the most terrible of all the gods, are women!”

Cleopatra had hissed rather than spoken these words, with her teeth set with rage, and had raised her small fist to threaten her brother; but Euergetes preserved a perfect composure till she had ceased speaking.  Then he took a step closer to her, crossed his arms over his breast, and asked her in the deepest bass of his fine deep voice: 

“Are you idiotically in love with this Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, or do you purpose to make use of him and his kith and kin in Rome against me?”

Transported with rage, and without blenching in the least at her brother’s piercing gaze, she hastily retorted:  “Up to this moment only the first perhaps—­for what is my husband to me?  But if you go on as you have begun I shall begin to consider how I may make use of his influence and of his liking for me, on the shores of the Tiber.”

“Liking!” cried Euergetes, and he laughed so loud and violently that Zoe, who was listening at the tent door, gave a little scream, and Cleopatra drew back a step.  “And to think that you—­the most prudent of the prudent—­who can hear the dew fall and the grass grow, and smell here in Memphis the smoke of every fire that is lighted in Alexandria or in Syria or even in Rome—­that you, my mother’s daughter, should be caught over head and ears by a broad-shouldered lout, for all the world like a clumsy town-girl or a wench at a loom.  This ignorant Adonis, who knows so well how to make use of his own strange and resolute personality, and of the power that stands in his background, thinks no more of the hearts he sets in flames than I of the earthen jar out of which water is drawn when I am thirsty.  You think to make use of him by the ’Tiber; but he has anticipated you, and learns from you all that is going on by the Nile and everything they most want to know in the Senate.