the hottest noon she would sit in the sun, with a large green umbrella to
shade her keen eyes, and those who desired to speak with her might find
shade as best they could. As she stood, much bent, but propped on her
ivory crutches, eagerly following every word of a conversation, she
looked as though she were prepared at any moment to spring into the
middle of it and interrupt the speaker. She always said exactly what she
meant without reserve or ruth; and throughout her long life, as the
mistress of great wealth, she had always been allowed to have her own
way. She asserted her rights even over her son, though he was the centre
of a web whose threads reached to the furthest circumference of the known
world. The peasants who tilled the earth by the Upper and Lower Nile,
the shepherds who kept their flocks in the Arabian desert, in Syria, or
on the Silphium meads of Cyrenaica, the wood-cutters of Lebanon and
Pontus, the mountaineers of Hispania and Sardinia, the brokers,
merchants, and skippers of every port on the Mediterranean, were bound by
these threads to the villa on the shore of Mareotis, and felt the tie
when the master there--docile as a boy to his mother's will--tightened or
released his hold.

His possessions, even in his youth, had been so vast that their increment
could bring no added enjoyment to him or his family, and yet their
increase had become his life's task. He strove for a higher sum to
figure on the annual balance sheet, as eagerly as an athlete strives for
a prize; and his mother not only inspected the account, but watched every
important undertaking with keen interest. When her son and his
colleagues doubted over some decision it was she who gave the casting
vote; but though her advice in most cases proved sound and profitable,
she herself ascribed this less to her own acumen and knowledge of the
world than to the hints she obtained from the stars and from magical
calculations. Her son did not follow her in these speculations, but he