and the prefect confessed to himself as he looked at Sabina’s face, marked as it was with minute wrinkles and touched up with red and white, that the sculptor who a few years previously had been commissioned to represent her as ‘Venus Victrix’ might very well have given the goddess a certain amount of resemblance to the imperial model.  If only her eyes, which were absolutely bereft of lashes, had not been quite so small and keen—­in spite of the dark lines painted round them—­and if only the sinews in her throat had not stood out quite so conspicuously from the flesh which formerly had covered them!

With a deep bow Titianus took the Empress’s right hand, covered with rings; but she withdrew it quickly from that of her husband’s friend and relative, as if she feared that the carefully-cherished limb—­useless as it was for any practical purpose, a mere toy among hands—­might suffer some injury, and wrapped it and her arm in her upper-robe.  But she returned the prefect’s friendly greeting with all the warmth at her command.  Though formerly at Rome she had been accustomed to see Titianus every day at her house, this was their first meeting in Alexandria; for the previous day, exhausted by the sufferings of her sea-voyage, she had been carried in a closed litter to the Caesareum, and this morning she had declined to receive his visit, as her whole time was given up to her physicians, bathing-women, and coiffeurs.

“How can you survive in this country?” she said in a low but harsh voice, which always made the hearer feel that it was that of a dull, fractious, childless woman.  “At noon the sun burns you up, and in the evening it is so cold—­so intolerably cold!’ As she spoke she drew her robe closer round her, but Titianus, pointing to the stoves in the middle of the hall, said: 

“I hoped we had succeeded in cutting the bowstrings of the Egyptian winter, and it is but a feeble weapon.”

“Still young, still imaginative, still a poet!” said the Empress wearily.  “I saw your wife a couple of hours since.  Africa seems to suit her less well; I was shocked to see Julia, the handsome matron, so altered.  She does not look well.”

“Years are the foe of beauty.”

“Frequently they are, but true beauty often resists their attacks.”

“You are yourself the living proof of your assertion.”

“That is as much as to say that I am growing old.”

“Nay—­only that you know the secret of remaining beautiful.”

“You are a poet!” murmured the Empress with a twitch of her thin under-lip.

“Affairs of state do not favor the Muses.”

“But I call any man a poet who sees things more beautiful than they are, or who gives them finer names than they deserve—­a poet, a dreamer, a flatterer—­for it comes to that.”

“Ah! modesty can always find words to repel even well-merited admiration.”