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.

"You do not believe me, for no one ever is ready to believe anything that
can diminish his self-esteem--and why should you believe me? I frankly
confess that I do not hesitate to lie when I hope to gain more by untruth
than by that much-belauded and divine truth, which, according to your
favorite Plato, is allied to all earthly beauty; but it is often just as
useless as beauty itself, for the useful and the beautiful exclude each
other in a thousand cases, for ten when they coincide. There, the gong
is sounding for the third time. If you care for plain proof that the