the image it reflects--seems to me like a carefully preserved wreck--"

"O my royal mistress," cried Iras, raising her hands beseechingly, "must
I again declare that neither the grey hairs which are again brown, nor
the few lines which Olympus will soon render invisible, nor whatever else
perhaps disturbs you in the image you behold reflected, impairs your
beauty? Unclouded and secure of victory, the spell of your godlike
nature--"

"Cease, cease!" interrupted Cleopatra. "I know what I know. No mortal
can escape the great eternal laws of Nature. As surely as birth
commences life, everything that exists moves onward to destruction
and decay."

"Yet the gods," Iras persisted, "give to their works different degrees of
existence. The waterlily blooms but a single day, yet how full of vigour
is the sycamore in the garden of the Paneum, which has flourished a
thousand years! Not a petal in the blossoms of your youth has faded, and
is it conceivable that there is even the slightest diminution in the love
of him who cast away all that man holds dearest because he could not
endure to part, even for days or weeks, from the woman whom he
worshipped?"

"Would that he had done so!" cried Cleopatra mournfully. "But are you so
sure that it was love which made him follow me? I am of a different
opinion. True love does not paralyze, but doubles the high qualities of
man. I learned this when Caesar was prisoned by a greatly superior force
within this very palace, his ships burned, his supply of water cut off.
In him also, in Antony, I was permitted to witness this magnificent
spectacle twenty--what do I say?-a hundred times, so long as he loved me