Lucius Ahenobarbus anything more than a very distant, a _very_ distant
acquaintance?"

"My dear girl," exclaimed Herennia, throwing up her hands, "either you
are the best actress, or the most innocent little wight, in Rome!
Don't you know all that they say about you?"

"Who--say--what--about--me?" stammered Cornelia, rising in her chair
so suddenly, as to disarrange all the work Cassandra had been doing on
her hair.

"Why, everybody," said Herennia, smiling with an exasperating
deliberation. "And then it has all come out in the daily gazette."[88]

[88] _Acta Diurna_, prepared officially.

"Where is it? Read! Let me see," pleaded Cornelia, agitated and
trembling.

"Why, how troubled you are," giggled Herennia. "Yes, I have my
freedman copy down the whole bulletin every day, as soon as it is
posted by the censor's officers; now let me see," and she produced
from under her robe a number of wooden, wax-covered tablets, strung
together: "the last prætor's edict; the will of old Publius Blæsus;"
and she ran over the headings with maddening slowness: "the speech in
the Senate of Curio--what an impudent rascal; the money paid yesterday
into the treasury,--how dull to copy all that down!--the meteor which
fell over in Tibur, and was such a prodigy; oh, yes, here it is at
last; you may as well hear what all Rome knows now, it's at the end,
among the private affairs. 'Lucius Ahenobarbus, son of Lucius