Only eight years old how could she already be so beautiful? wondered the dazzled Brutus, who knew her well because his mother was a great friend of her grandmother's. Fair like ice and snow, chin pointed, cheekbones arched, faintly pink lips as delicious as a strawberry, a pair of widely opened blue eyes that gazed with gentle liveliness on all that they beheld; if Brutus had dipped into the poetry of love, it was because of her whom he had loved for oh, years! Not truly understanding that it was love until quite recently, when she had turned her gaze on him with such a sweet smile that realization had dawned with the shock of a thunderclap. He had gone to his mother that very evening, and informed her that he wished to marry Julia when she grew up. Servilia had stared, astonished. "My dear Brutus, she's a mere child! You'd have to wait nine or ten years for her." "She'll be betrothed long before she's old enough to marry," he had answered, his anguish plain. "Please, Mama, as soon as her father returns home, petition for her hand in marriage!" "You may well change your mind." "Never, never!" "Her dowry is minute." "But her birth is everything you could want in my wife." "True." The black eyes which could grow so hard rested on his face not unsympathetically; Servilia appreciated the strength of that argument. So she had turned it over in her mind for a moment, then nodded. Very well, Brutus, when her father is next in Rome, I'll ask. You don't need a rich bride, but it is essential that her birth match your own, and a Julia would be ideal. Especially this Julia. Patrician on both sides." And so they had left it to wait until Julia's father returned from his post as quaestor in Further Spain. The most junior of the important magistracies, quaestor. But trust Servilia to know that Julia's father had filled it extremely well. Odd that she had never met him, considering how small a group the true aristocrats of Rome were. She was one; he was another. But, feminine rumor had it, he was something of an outsider among his own kind, too busy for the social round most of his peers cultivated whenever they were in Rome. It would have been easier to sue for his daughter's hand on Brutus's behalf did she know him already, though she had little doubt what his answer would be. Brutus was highly eligible, even in the eyes of a Julian.