Brinnaria, standing alert and springily erect, her white habit dazzlingly fresh, fresh as the white flowers clasped at her bosom by her big pearl brooch, looked like a care-free young matron who had had a long night’s sleep and a good breakfast. Commodus, looking her up nd down, mentally contrasted her easy pose and the rosiness of her smiling face with the tense statuesqueness and austere, almost grim countenances of her three colleagues. He noticed that her three-strand pearl necklace seemed to become her more than theirs became the other three and that she wore her square, white headdress with an indefinable difference, that there was a difference in the very hang of her headband and in the way its tassels lay on her bosom. He noted two unusual adjuncts to her attire; a long, rough towel through her girdle and a gold sacrificial dipper thrust in beside it.
She looked him full in the face and slowly raised her left arm, stiffly straight, hand extended, palm down, until her finger-tips were almost level with his face and not a foot from it. Holding it so at full stretch she asked:
Commodus regarded her finger-tips, her face, and again her finger-tips:
“Hercules be good to me!” he exclaimed. “Not a tremble, not a waver, not a quiver. You are mighty cool. You’ve plenty of confidence. I take it you are ready.”
“I am,” said Brinnaria. “Where is that sieve?”
From behind her spoke Calvaster. “I have a sieve here.”
Commodus rounded on him like an angry mastiff.
“Who authorized you to speak?” he demanded. “You act as if you were Emperor. You are merely a minor Pontiff. Remember that and speak when you are spoken to.”
Calvaster, abashed but persistent, stammered:
“None of your concern to offer a sieve,” Commodus growled. “You insult all of us and me most of all. Do you take me to be so unfair as to subject this lady to her test with a sieve brought and offered by her accuser?”
“Show me that sieve,” the Emperor commanded.
Calvaster produced from under his robes a copper-hooped sieve strung with linen.
“What do you think of that sieve?” he inquired.
Brinnaria held it up to the light and looked through the web; held it level, upside down, and looked along the web.
“It is very irregularly woven,” she pronounced; “some of the meshes are three times the size of others. It is very unevenly strung, it bags in two places.” She held it up to her face a moment.