My life went wrong at Milan, or perhaps I should say that it turned from the path into which I had gratefully settled. Augustine was teaching rhetoric to students hardly less ungrateful than those in the south. Roman boys of good family were, it had transpired, bad debtors. The end of the term would roll around, and all those faithful faces in the front row would miss the last lecture and vanish into revelry, and my lover’s purse was full of moths and little more. His mother wanted him to marry an heiress. I can’t remember her name, the poor trout. She was a little creature with fine airs and graces, but all the intellect of a baby’s rattle. Monica was adamant: her son must wed a woman of class—and not me, though we’d never made any suggestion we might tie the knot, and I honestly wasn’t sure I wanted to. I had my lover, my son and my studies. I didn’t need to fret over which god should bind me to a man—or how, if he fattened in body and withered in heart as he grew older, I might release myself from the company of a boor. In response to Monica’s chattering, I wondered aloud whether I should find my own gentleman of class to wed. I had my son young, and my body bore hardly a mark; if Augustine married the trout—she had a piscine face, alas, and was forever gaping—I should say fair play and exchange rings with Longinus or Sextius and be glad. The chastity of Roman wives being legendary more as a noble ideal than a practice on the ground—or, as it might be, in the bathhouse, or on an ornamental lawn. I am forever confounded by those who would establish a way of doing things that all others must follow or be deemed unhappy. Sometimes the best things are found in unlikely places.