'See!' coaxed the African. 'I take off my coat!' She suited the action to the word and divested herself of her outer garment, which was the long coat and skirt in one, worn only by free women. 'I cover my head, in the Kokóna's presence!' She quickly flattened her wild red hair under a kerchief which she knotted at the back of her neck. 'I roll up my sleeves! Am I anything but a slave, a bath-woman? Why will the beautiful Kokóna not let me wait on her?'
Zoë turned her eyes and saw the change, and suddenly her objection vanished; for Rustan's wife looked precisely like the black slave-women who used to attend the ladies in the Roman bath in Rhangabé's palace. The association of ideas was so strong that the young girl could not help smiling faintly.
'As you please,' she said, raising herself upon one hand and preparing to get up.
Carlo Zeno's interview with Rustan had been short and business-like, as has been said. It was indeed not at all likely that a man of the Venetian's temper and tastes would talk with a Bokharian slave-dealer a moment longer than necessary.
Rustan, on hearing what was wanted, declared that he had the very thing; in fact, by a wonderful coincidence, it was the very thing in the acme of perfection, a dream, a vision, fully worth four hundred ducats, and certainly not to be sold for three hundred; it had fine natural hair that had never been dyed; its teeth were twenty-eight in number, the wisdom teeth not having yet appeared, and Rustan would wager that Messer Carlo could not find a single pearl in all Constantinople to match one of those eight-and-twenty; its ankles were so finely turned that a woman could span them with her thumb and forefinger. Rustan felt safe in saying this, for his black wife's huge hand could have spanned Zoë's throat; also it had a most beautiful and slender waist, which, as Messer Carlo remarked, was certainly a point of beauty. Moreover, Rustan would deliver a signed and sealed certificate with it.
For Zeno was conscientious, and held Marco Pesaro's letter in his hand while he questioned the Bokharian in regard to the various points in succession, lest he should forget any one of them. He did not in the least believe a word that Rustan said, of course. The East was never the land of simple, trusting faith between man and man. He would even have wagered that Rustan had nothing in his prison of the sort Pesaro wanted, and at the moment of the interview he would have been quite right. But he was tolerably sure that if he insisted on having the best, the best to be had would be forthcoming in a week at the utmost. Satisfied with this prospect, he dismissed Rustan and thought no more about the matter, except to wish that Marco Pesaro had not troubled him with such an absurd commission.