Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/228

 'I cannot quarrel with you for that,' said Este. 'Theodoric was less scrupulous than you. He ordered the plunder of the graves, and the moderns followed him.'

'Who was Theodoric?'

'Never mind; I like your instinct better than his greed. It is a right one. They give to the galleys a poor wretch who opens a tomb made yesterday to seek for treasure; and the nobles and the students who plunder the Etruscans and carry their toys of death off into cabinets and glass cases are applauded. Life is very unjust; most crimes are sanctioned in some form or another when they take grand names.'

'I could not steal from them, even for you,' she answered him, without noticing his subtler argument.

Even for him she would not have touched those golden fibulæ, those golden grasshoppers, that the dead had carried with them to the earth and trusted to it as the wild partridge trusts her nest.

Even when she used the vessels of bronze and pottery, and looked at her own face in the steel mirror of the Tyndarids, she was afraid she did an irreligious thing, an ungenerous thing, since the dead could