In fact, Lucius asserted that these styles of arranging the hair were removable, and could be taken from the statues’ heads and exchanged for modern ones as fashion required--a triumph of the plastic art, as he ironically added.
So they walked through the second pillared court-yard to the garden. The dusky avenues of trees, whose spreading boughs still permitted enough of the fading daylight to enter to reveal the box-bordered gravelled paths, invited thoughtful, pleasant strolls, and the watchman at the back of the house afforded a sufficient guarantee that no intruder would steal after the youths.
“At the end of last month,” Lucius Rutilius began, “Hero had firmly resolved to unite her life with mine. I made her acquaintance at Tibur, where her father had purchased Junius’ Gellius’ villa--it adjoins my own, you know--after the death of its first owner. Wandering through the park, I saw the bewitching girlish figure on the opposite side of the wall that divides Gellius’ grounds from mine. Hero was standing in the shade of a laurel-bush, her fair hair adorned simply with a rose, scattering with her dainty little hands crumbs or corn, which she held gathered in her robe, to a fluttering cloud of sparrows. Concealed behind the pedestal of a goddess of autumn, I could watch her quietly without having my presence suspected.
“Ah, my dear Caius, I should vainly try to describe the subtle charm, childlike innocence, and enchanting grace revealed to me in that quarter of an hour! How she chatted with her protégés, repelled the bold and encouraged the timid ones, how she jested and laughed, how her loose tunic slipped from her snowy shoulder--it was bewitching! In short, those fifteen minutes decided my fate. For the first time during a life of twenty-six years I experienced at the sight of a girl who charmed me a feeling of sacred reserve, a sort of reverence that made any wanton thought seem a crime. In my ardent dreams, which instantly twined with eager longing around this lovely apparition, I saw her only as the presiding mistress of my house, the ruler of my life....”
“It really appears to be a serious matter,” murmured Caius Bononius. “Does the night-breeze rustling through the boughs deceive me, or what is it that makes your voice tremble so?”