Cassius again. As much as he approved of Cassius when he was present, he found it increasingly irritating to hear of him when he was not. Brutus had heard others profess to be perturbed by Cassius' bearing, but with him it was quite the contrary: having Cassius under his eye had always been a good thing, not least of all because it assured him of where Cassius was not. The less he saw of him, the less he liked, the more he questioned. He trusted Cassius, almost instinctively - wanted to trust him - and in his presence he found that he could yield to this inclination with few qualms enough. Yet in his absence Brutus' mind could not refrain from collecting rumors of another Cassius - fragments which he did his best to keep from piecing together, though he could not forget them at will . . . To think of them as two different people would have made matters much easier, but when word of Cassius abounded and presence of Cassius lacked - that is, when both clusters of information were equally abstract from present reality - it was difficult to ignore the fact that in theory they both pointed back to a single referent.