For
myself I have never plumed myself on such features of my adventures,
though they are not unpleasing to recall.
When, in the spring of the next year, while Fuscianus and Silanus were
consuls, I came to know Mercablis and to consider him, I arrived at the
conclusion that his inclination for solitude and his aloofness were not
the result of any dread of strangers or of any need for seclusion, like
mine, but the product of a disposition naturally churlish, crabbed, and
unsocial.
Habituated as the procurator had been to Mercablis and his loathing for
strangers, my desire for privacy had seemed to him as a matter of course.
Resolute as Mercablis was to be let alone, he was enormously vain and
self-conceited and puffed up with his conviction of his own importance. He
never smiled, but some subtle alteration in his countenance betrayed that
any flattery pleased him.
He was a tall, spare, bony man, with a dry, brown, leathery skin, lean
legs and arms, a stringy neck, almost no chin, a hooked nose, deep set
little greeny-gray eyes and intensely black, harsh, stiff, curly hair and
very bushy eyebrows. He wore old, worn, faded garments and stalked about
as if the fate of the universe depended on him.
Certainly he never failed to surprise all Rome when the time came for his
novelty to be displayed.
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