Some flaw of vision, thought Marius, must be involved in the
philosopher's contempt for it--some diseased point of thought, or
moral dulness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest
of all the emperor's inhumanities, the temper of the suicide; for
which there was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world.
"'Tis part of the business of life," he read, "to lose it
handsomely." On due occasion, "one might give life the slip." The
moral or mental powers might fail one; and then it were a fair
question, precisely, whether the time for taking leave was not come:-
-"Thou canst leave this prison when thou wilt. Go forth boldly!"
Just there, in the bare capacity to entertain such question at all,
there was what Marius, with a soul which must always leap up in loyal
gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching him as it touched the
flies in the air, could not away with. There, surely, was a sign of
some crookedness in the natural power of apprehension. It was the
[55] attitude, the melancholy intellectual attitude, of one who might
be greatly mistaken in things--who might make the greatest of
mistakes.

A heart that could forget itself in the misfortune, or even in the
weakness of others:--of this Marius had certainly found the trace, as
a confidant of the emperor's conversations with himself, in spite of
those jarring inhumanities, of that pretension to a stoical
indifference, and the many difficulties of his manner of writing. He
found it again not long afterwards, in still stronger evidence, in
this way. As he read one morning early, there slipped from the rolls
of manuscript a sealed letter with the emperor's superscription,
which might well be of importance, and he felt bound to deliver it at
once in person; Aurelius being then absent from Rome in one of his
favourite retreats, at Praeneste, taking a few days of quiet with his