sweetest wine is repulsive when it has been tasted by impure lips.
After every feast and spectacle he loaded her with outrageous reproaches,
and when at last, weary of such treatment, she refused to quit the house,
he obliged her nevertheless to accompany him as often as the Legate
Quintillus desired it. The legate was his superior-officer, and he sent
her every day some present or flowers.

Up to this time she had borne with him, and had tried to excuse him, and
to think herself answerable for much of what she endured. But at last--
about ten months after her marriage--something occurred between her and
Phoebicius--something which stood like a wall of brass between him and
her; and as this something had led to his banishment to the remote oasis,
and to his degradation to the rank of captain of a miserable maniple,
instead of his obtaining his hoped for promotion, he began to torment her
systematically while she tried to protect herself by icy coldness, so
that at last it came to this, that the husband, for whom she felt nothing
but contempt, had no more influence on her life, than some physical pain
which a sick man is doomed to endure all through his existence.

In his presence she was silent, defiant, and repellent, but as soon as he
quitted her, her innate, warm-hearted kindliness and child-like merriment
woke up to new life, and their fairest blossoms opened out in the
senator's house among the little troop who amply repaid her love with
theirs.

Phoebicius belonged to the worshippers of Mithras, and he often fasted
in his honor to the point of exhaustion, while on the other hand he
frequently drank with his boon companions, at the feasts of the god,
till he was in a state of insensibility.