Was not that likeness of the husband, in the boy beside her, really the effect of a shameful magic, in which the blood of the murdered gladiator, his true father, had been an ingredient?
Were the tricks for [219] deceiving husbands which the Roman poet describes, really hers, and her household an efficient school of all the arts of furtive love?
Or, was the husband too aware, like every one beside?
Were certain sudden deaths which happened there, really the work of apoplexy, or the plague?
The man whose ears, whose soul, those rumours were meant to penetrate, was, however, faithful to his sanguine and optimist philosophy, to his determination that the world should be to him simply what the higher reason preferred to conceive it; and the life's journey Aurelius had made so far, though involving much moral and intellectual loneliness, had been ever in affectionate and helpful contact with other wayfarers, very unlike himself.

Since his days of earliest childhood in the Lateran gardens, he seemed to himself, blessing the gods for it after deliberate survey, to have been always surrounded by kinsmen, friends, servants, of exceptional virtue.

From the great Stoic idea, that we are all fellow-citizens of one city, he had derived a tenderer, a more equitable estimate than was common among Stoics, of the eternal shortcomings of men and women.

Considerations that might tend to the sweetening of his temper it was his daily care to store away, with a kind of philosophic pride in the thought that no one took more good-naturedly than he the "oversights" of his neighbours.

For had not Plato taught (it was not [220] paradox, but simple truth of experience) that if people sin, it is because they know no better, and are "under the necessity of their own ignorance"?
Hard to himself, he seemed at times, doubtless, to decline too softly upon unworthy persons.
Actually, he came thereby upon many a useful instrument.