That reduced her chances of actually speaking to him, but to Sulla her conduct was a resurrection of an old and awful nightmare of the days when Julilla had buried him beneath an avalanche of love letters she or her girl had slipped into the sinus of his toga at every opportunity, in circumstances where he didn't dare draw attention to their actions. Well, that had ended in a marriage, a virtually indissoluble confarreatio union which had lasted bitter, importunate, humiliating until her death by suicide, yet one more terrible episode in an endless procession of women hungry to tame him. So Sulla had gone into the mean and stinking, crowded alleys of the Subura, and confided in the only friend he owned with the detachment he needed so desperately at that moment Aurelia, sister-in-law of his dead wife, Julilla. "What can I do?" he had cried to her. "I'm trapped, Aurelia; it's Julilla all over again! I can't be rid of her!" "The trouble is, they have so little to do with their time," said Aurelia, looking grim. "Nursemaids for their babies, little parties with their friends chiefly distinguished by the amount of gossip they exchange, looms they have no intention of using, and heads too empty to find solace in a book. Most of them feel nothing for their husbands because their marriages are made for convenience their fathers need extra political clout, or their husbands the dowries or the extra nobility. A year down the road, and they're ripe for the mischief of a love affair." She sighed. "After all, Lucius Cornelius, in the matter of love they can exercise free choice, and in how many areas can they do that? The wiser among them content themselves with slaves. But the most foolish are those who fall in love. And that, unfortunately, is what has happened here. This poor silly child Dalmatica is quite out of her mind! And you are the cause of it." He chewed his lip, hid his thoughts by staring at his hands.