Page:Henryk Sienkiewicz - Quo Vadis (1897 Curtin translation).djvu/41

Rh for he had not expected to hear verses of Homer from the lips of a maiden of whose barbarian extraction he had heard previously from Vinicius. Hence he looked with an inquiring glance on Pomponia; but she could not give him an answer, for she was looking at that moment, with a smile, at the pride reflected on the face of her husband.

He was not able to conceal that pride. First, he had become attached to Lygia as to his own daughter; and second, in spite of his old Roman prejudices, which commanded him to thunder against Greek and the spread of the language, he considered it as the summit of social polish. He himself had never been able to learn it well; over this he suffered in secret. He was glad therefore that an answer was given in the language and the poetry of Homer to this exquisite man both of fashion and letters, who was ready to consider Plautius's house as barbarian.

"We have a pedagogue, a Greek," said he, turning to Petronius, "who teaches our boy, and the maiden overhears the lessons. She is a wagtail yet, but a dear one, to which we have both grown attached."

Petronius looked through the branches of woodbine into the garden, and at the three persons who were playing there. Vinicius had thrown aside his toga, and, wearing only his tunic, was striking the ball which Lygia, standing opposite, with raised arms was trying to catch. The maiden did not make a great impression on Petronius at the first glance; she seemed to him too slender. But from the moment when he looked at her more nearly in the triclinium he thought to himself that Aurora might look like her; and as a judge he understood that there was in her something uncommon. He considered everything and estimated everything; hence her face, rosy and clear, and her fresh lips, as if set for a kiss, and the blue eyes like the azure of the sea, and the alabaster whiteness of her forehead, and the wealth of her dark hair, with the reflection of amber or Corinthian bronze gleaming in its folds, and her slight neck and the divine slope of her shoulders, and the whole posture, flexible, slender, young with the youth of May and of freshly opened flowers. The artist was roused in him, and the worshipper of beauty, who felt that beneath a statue of that maiden one might write, "Spring." All at once he remembered Chrysothemis, and pure laughter seized him. Chrysothemis seemed to him, with her golden powder on her hair and her darkened brows, to be fabulously faded,—something in the