Page:The Song of the Sirens.djvu/208

 for three. If you haven't got her already, you'll never get her now. And if you could I don't see how a mutiny of his troops will help you."

"Of course you don't see," Clodius retorted. "Neither should I, if I had not been forced to see, and even now I cannot credit my senses. Mucia likes me, likes me so much that I should be sure that any other woman liking me as much loved me completely. Perhaps she does, if I could only make her realize her feelings. But she does not realize them. She delights to be with me, she enjoys my solicitude for her, she accepts all my attentions, but she accepts them as if I were her brother or her father. Off and on I believe she loves me, not for an instant have I believed that she feels that she does. She is walled, towered, bastioned and moated about with her love for Pompey. Not for Pompey as he is, but for what he seems to her. She worships that outward semblance of faultless, impeccable capacity and uprightness which he presents to her as to all the world. Once I show her the fellow as he really is, and she will see what a sham he has always been. He has succeeded all his life because he has succeeded, not from any real strength of character, not from any ability to command success. His life has been a series of dazzling windfalls of luck. He has never wrung success from adversity or