"Am I deceived?
Are you not Greeks?
Are you some ignorant Italian wenches who can't speak anything but their native jargon?
Bah! You've misplaced a curl.
Take that!" And she struck the girl across the palms, with the flat of her silver mirror.

Semiramis shivered and flushed, but said nothing.
"Do I not have a perfect Greek pronunciation ?" said the lady, turning to Pratinas.

"It is impossible to carry on a polite conversation in Latin." "I can assure your ladyship," said the Hellene, with still another bland smile, "that your pronunciation is something exceedingly remarkable." Valeria was pacified, and lay back submitting to her hairdressers[40], while Pratinas, who knew what kind of "philosophy" appealed most to his fair patroness, read with a delicate yet altogether admirable voice, a number of scraps of erotic verse that he said friends had just sent on from Alexandria.
[40] _Ornatrices_.
"Oh! the shame to call himself a philosopher," groaned the neglected Pisander to himself.

"If I believed in the old gods, I would invoke the Furies upon him." But Valeria was now in the best of spirits.

"By the two Goddesses,"[41] she swore, "what charming sentiments you Greeks can express.