"Where did you pick it up?"
"Oh, at Pyrmix's of course, near the baths. For what do you take me?
You might make a long _tarantinidion_ out of it. You can't imagine
what embroidery there is on it! Guess the subject!"
"I don't know!... Flowers--animals?"
"In gold and silk--the whole story of Diogenes, the Cynic."
"Ah, that must be pretty!" cried the girl. "Come, by all means, I
shall expect you."
Zephirinus glanced at the _clepsydra_, a water-clock placed in a niche
in the wall.
"I am late--quite late! I must go on to a money-lender, a jeweller,
then the patriarch, and then to the church. Till then, good-bye."
"Don't forget," Krokala cried to him, with a mischievous gesture.
The sub-deacon disappeared, followed by his slave.
A crowd of grooms, dancing girls, gymnasts, and tamers of wild beasts
invaded the stables. With his face protected by a mask, the gladiator,
Mermillion, was heating a bar of iron red-hot; he was taming a lion
newly received from Africa, and which could be heard roaring through
the stable-wall.
"You'll be the death of me, granddaughter, and you'll go to hell
yourself! Oh, oh, how my back hurts! I'm done for!"
"Is that you, grandfather Gnyphon? What do you want?" asked Krokala in
a vexed voice.
Gnyphon was a little old man with cunning tearful eyes, which shone
under eyebrows active as two white mice. He had the violet nose of a
drunkard, wore Libyan breeches, patched and botched here and there,
and on his head a Phrygian cap.
"You've come again for money," grumbled Krokala, "and you've been
drinking again."
"It's a sin to use such language. You'll have to answer for my soul to
God. Just think what you've brought me to. I am living now in the
Smokatian quarter; I hire a little cellar from an image-carver, and
every day I have to see him making his horrible idols in marble.
There's a nice occupation for a Christian! I scarcely open my eyes in
the morning, when tap, tap, tap,--my landlord's hammering his
marble--bringing white devils into the world; damnable gods that stand
laughing at me. How am I to keep out of the wine-shop? O Lord, have
mercy on us! I'm simply weltering in Pagan horrors, like a pig in a
sty, and it'll be reckoned against us ... and who'll be responsible,
I'd like to know? Why, you! You're rolling in money, and yet you leave
a poor miserable old man----"
"You lie, Gnyphon! You're not poor; you're a miser; you've got a
money-box under the bed!"