The courtesans in their large wigs of false blond hair, were lurking for the guests, with groups of curious idlers.

A great conflagration was visible in the distance.

Was it in Rome; or in one of the villages of the country?
Pausing for a few minutes on the terrace to watch it, Marius was for the first time able to converse intimately with Apuleius; and in this moment of confidence the "illuminist," himself with locks so carefully arranged, and seemingly so full of affectations, almost like one of those light women there, dropped a veil as it were, and appeared, though still permitting the play of a certain element of theatrical interest in his bizarre tenets, to be ready to explain and defend his position reasonably.

For a moment his fantastic foppishness and his pretensions to ideal [87] vision seemed to fall into some intelligible congruity with each other.

In truth, it was the Platonic Idealism, as he conceived it, which for him literally animated, and gave him so lively an interest in, this world of the purely outward aspects of men and things .-- Did material things, such things as they had had around them all that evening, really need apology for being there, to interest one, at all?
Were not all visible objects--the whole material world indeed, according to the consistent testimony of philosophy in many forms--"full of souls"?
embarrassed perhaps, partly imprisoned, but still eloquent souls?
Certainly, the contemplative philosophy of Plato, with its figurative imagery and apologue, its manifold aesthetic colouring, its measured eloquence, its music for the outward ear, had been, like Plato's old master himself, a two-sided or two-coloured thing.