Madam Sapphira by Edgar Saltus

The paths to happiness are not many, but they are well defined. The finger-posts of the easiest are those which point to health and indifference.

But there are others that have a value, and between them the wayfarer has halted and will halt and conjecture. One leads to religion, and the pilgrim, if he be sorely depressed and temperamentally disposed will find it an excellent route. It may be tortuous, the goal may be remote, there may be ghosts at the crossings, but at least the traveller has that greatest of consolations -- the belief that he is still a child, watched over and protected.

Another leads to that pure realm of ideas where individual preoccupations may not enter, where only the mysteries of beauty and of life endure.

But this route, rarely chosen, is adapted but to the student to whom solitude can offer the dual advantage of being with himself and of not being with others.

Nevius selected it. Health had ceased to interest him, temperamentally he was too nervous to acquire and preserve that suspension of judgment of which indifference is the fruit; and mentally he was too agile to accept dogmas unquestioned. He indeed tried to fatigue the mind in the fatigue of the body, but when, after hours of that sponge for thought which the saddle alone supplies, there was a question-mark in waiting. The why and wherefore of the divorce haunted him still. And as law was no longer possible, and his career at an end, he had a choice between drink and study. In the former he tried to drown that interrogation mark. But the interrogation mark knew how to swim. Then he plunged into history.

Between Caesar and Heliogabalus there was a moment when the gods no longer were, when Christ had not come, when man alone existed. In disgust of modernity it was to that epoch that he turned. The classics were at his elbow, and in the splendors which they evoked he reconstructed Rome. Presently the booksellers were at work and he had invoices of curious lore. Before the roses could fade he wreathed himself with them. He had adventures in the Subura, escapades with dazzling young empresses and relived the inimitable life. To the hum of harps he floated on a ship that had gardens, bowers, spangled sails and a jewelled prow. On painted elephants he quarried lions in their African fens. Throbbing through the rushes of the Nile there came to him the grave music of archaic hymns. Serapis whispered to him. Isis visited him unveiled. He sailed the Aegean, scaled Parnassus, lounged in the Academe. He prayed in temples that never heard an atheist's voice, passed initiate into the mysteries of Eleusis, encountered divinities and monsters, curious superstitions and untenable creeds. He found grace and lust, deformity and magnificence, unimagined depravities, torturesome delights. He wandered from palace to lupanar, from prison to shrine, from forum to camp. There was not a sin nor an altar that he passed unexamined, not a secret that he left unprobed.

When antiquity was his, he rose from its study perplexed. Nowhere had he encountered hypocrisy. Therewith the Why returned.