are both much interested by the strangeness of your fate, by
the difficulty and delicacy of your situation and by the wonderful
constancy of you both. Faustina and I are a most united pair,
never happy out of each other's company and very proud of our
domestic felicity. We are, if I may use the word, rather prone to
gloat over it, and, while continually congratulating ourselves and
each other, we cannot but mourn the infrequency of such happiness
throughout our Italian nobility. There are few matrons in Rome as
serenely happy as your friend Flexinna, few indeed who find all
their happiness in children, husband and household. And of those
who really enjoy their homes most are remarried after a divorce,
or even after two or more. Our society suffers from a plague
worse than the pestilence itself, a plague of greed for excitement,
eagerness for novelty, of peevishness and fickleness.

"In this unhealthy atmosphere such households as Vocco's are
most notable. And that you, who seem by nature fitted for just
such blessedness as has befallen Flexinna, should have been
robbed of it by a strange series of peculiar circumstances wins
for you our interest and our solicitude. Still more are our hearts
drawn towards you by your unwavering fidelity, alike to your
present duties and all that they imply and to that love which you
have had to put away and forget, to the ideal of that felicity
which you have had to postpone so far.

"Faustina desires an interview with you. She is now in the amber
gallery. I shall have you conducted there, if you do not object."

Brinnaria could not very well object and after an equerry, very
stately in his garb of duty, and two gaudily clad pages had escorted