Читать книгу No. XIII; or, The Story of the Lost Vestal онлайн

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Cæcilia was accounted beautiful, and a person of distinction. She was one of the leaders of fashion, and her cosmetics and perfumes were the admiration of her friends, and the envy of her enemies.

Perhaps the word “enemy” is too strong a word to use. Cæcilia had scarcely enough character to provoke an enemy. Her colourless nature knew no strong shadows and no bright lights. She lived for herself and the passing hour, and the maternal instinct was dead within her—dead, so far as any trouble about her children was concerned. She could love them till they needed anything at her hands, but if that point were reached, her love could not show itself in taking any trouble on their behalf. From all we can gather in contemporary records, the atmosphere in which the fashionable Roman lady of these times lived and moved was a deadening one. A few sprang out of it, who read and studied their own Latin authors and the Greek tongue, and with a wonderful persistency of purpose mastered many abstruse questions, and hungered after higher and better things, and nobler aims.