Agrippa smiled absently. These two remarks of diverse character were tentative. She was sounding Marsyas' nature.
"I shall not sail till it is done," Agrippa declared.
"A rare diversion to tempt a man from his ambitions," the young Essene retorted quickly. Junia had made her sounding. She persisted in her latter rôle.
"It is," she averred. "Flora is elected among the beautiful girls of the theaters; she typifies universal love; she runs, leaving a trail of yellow roses behind her, which lead the multitude on to the delight she means to take for herself--and that is all. It is merely a pretty feast, but the world is made of many well-meaning though blundering natures; and the revel does not always reach the high mark of refinement at its highest."
Agrippa's eyes on the Roman woman expressed intensest amusement and admiration, though they lost nothing of their cool self-possession.
"My lord," Marsyas observed coldly, "there are as choice evils in Rome."
"Evil! Tut, tut! How monstrous serious the little world takes itself! How great is its problems, how towering its philosophies, how bad its badness! See us wrinkle our little old brows and smile agedly over the creature impulses of children and forget that the gods sit on the brink of Olympus and smile at us. How we deplore the Feast of Flora--and out upon us! None--save perchance thyself, good sir, and thy rigid order--but goes reveling after pleasure and chooses a love or casts a stone at an offender--and soberly calls it a crisis or a principle! Philosophy! Discovering the obvious! Badness! Only nature, more or less emphatic! All a matter of meat and drink, shelter and apparel and the recreation of ourselves! Everything else is merely an attribute of the simple essentials. Is it not so, good sir?"
Marsyas shook his head. For the first time in his life he had heard the world forgiven and the sound of it was good. He could not help remembering Lydia's words, in contrast. But he was not convinced.
"It is not from the place of the gods that we feel, do and believe," he said. "The child's difficulties are heavy to it; it can not imagine them to be greater. So if thy reasoning hold, lady, perhaps the higher God smiles at the rage of Jove and the threats of Mars and the loves and pains of Venus. But Jove and Mars and Venus do not smile at them; nor does the child at his fallen sand-house or his ruined bauble. It is therefore a serious world for worldlings."