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This is too dreadful. Well, I never." She half whimpered as she walked; and Berenice, surveying the room with dignity, a lofty superiority in her face, led solemnly forth, a strange, lacerating pain about her heart. What was at the bottom of these shameful statements?
They passed out from the glancing shadows of the trees towards the Piccadilly entrance. Here they paused for a moment and stood together looking down the drive. The sunlight seemed to touch with quivering fire the brilliant phantasmagoria. Berenice was serious. Her dark eyes swept down the broad path and her under-lip quivered.
Following on the destruction of Jerusalem, a passion of mixed hatred and contempt against the Jews moved the Roman nobility and the Roman masses. The Flavian court, representing the middle classes, by no means shared the feeling, and indeed the infatuation of Titus for the Jewish princess Berenice, the sister of Agrippa, was one of the scandals that most stirred the anger of the Romans.
"He is your cousin, and I have nothing to say against him as a husband; he is kind and indulgent, and a brave soldier, and all one could want; but he is not a hero like Beric." Beric laughed. "You should have said a giant, Berenice, which would have been much nearer the truth.
The entanglement of Titus with the Jewish princess Berenice was the final outrage. The satiric poets Martial and Juvenal inserted frequent ribald references to Jewish customs; but the nature of their works precluded a serious criticism. Martial was a master of flouts, jeers, and gibes, and Juvenal was a soured and disappointed provincial, who delighted to hurl wild reproaches.
In taste it is like lobster and oyster combined, but as tough as pin-wire. We had a great tossing for three days after leaving Berenice, and stopping every night. It is hard to imagine anything more squalid than the Egyptian fortress of Halaib, as it is spelt on the map, or Halei as it is pronounced, which was our next halting-place, and from which we succeeded in getting a little way inland.
But that was not your fault. "For what I am doing, do you, at least, not blame me. If there were a single person in the world dependent upon me, or to whom my death would be a real loss, I would remain. But there is no one. And, whereas alive I can do you no good, dead I may! Berenice, your husband lives in suffering and in poverty; your husband and your little boy.
To stand here among these sumptuously dressed women, to endure the glances which he knew were watching him from all parts of the room, to be pricked with this monkish title by a woman who was making of him and of the whole incident a sport and a spectacle, stung him to the quick. He thought of Berenice, and he cast at Mrs.
"Mamma was wondering if you would visit us to-night, Monsieur Falcroft, when I saw you staring at us as if we were ghosts." A burst of malicious laughter followed. "Berenice, Berenice," remonstrated her mother, "when will you cease such tasteless remarks!" She blushed in her pretty matronly fashion and put her hand on her daughter's mouth. "Don't mind her, Madame Mineur!
Several days having gone by without farther allusion to the matter, he decided that his remonstrances had been effective, and was greatly relieved to be freed from a task so repugnant under any circumstances and made intolerable by his feeling for Berenice.
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