The next day, he said, everyone of them had returned home.
I heaved a deep sigh of relief: my tenants and my Sabine Estate were off my mind; I might be entirely easy about all things in Sabinum.
He then told me what a brilliant success Marcia was among the pleasure- loving, novelty-loving, luxurious high-living set in our city society.
"Since the enforcement of the old-fashioned laws relaxed and became a dead letter and some were even repealed," he said, "not a few men of equestrian rank have married freed-women and such occurrences no longer cause any scandal or much remark.

But the results are not generally productive of any social success for the ill-assorted pair.
"I have known a few freedwomen married to men of wealth, and equestrian rank, who gained some vague approximation of social standing among the wives of their husbands' friends.

But Marcia is the first freedwoman I ever knew or heard of to be treated, by everybody and at once, as if she had been freeborn and since birth in her husband's class.

Martius has not brought this about, or aided much; he is a good enough fellow, but he has no social qualities; for all the power he has of attracting friends he might as well be an archaic statue.

Marcia has done it all.