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Little lady," spoke Truttidius, "it is impious to doubt the truth of pious stories handed down from days of old." "That isn't answering my question," said the practical Brinnaria. "What I want you to tell me is to say right out plain do you believe it. Did anybody really ever carry water in a sieve?"
"You didn't want to be a Vestal?" Truttidius asked, eyeing her over his work. "Not I!" Brinnaria declared. "I can't think of anything worse except being killed." "Well," mused Truttidius, "there is no accounting for tastes. Most girls would be wild with delight at the idea. But there would be no sense in being a Vestal unless you wanted to be one."
"But few are the women who could so carry a sieve of water or could even so hold it that the water would not run through at once." "How could the water be retained at all?" queried Brinnaria the practical. "What is the explanation?" Truttidius wrinkled up his face in deep thought. "You have seen wine spilled at dinner," he illustrated.
Numisia indicated the sieve on the forward arm of the second cross-piece of the fourth pole from the bow. Lutorius, at the Emperor's bidding, called the directions to Truttidius, who, bowed and bent with age until he looked almost like a clothed ape, wizened so that his leathery, wrinkled face was like a dried apple, was standing near the middle of the boat.
Truttidius was beating copper wire, a process always fascinating to watch. "I've had an awful time in the country with Aunt Septima," Brinnaria chatted, "and I had an awful scare before they sent me to the country. Daddy threatened to make me a Vestal." "In place of Rabulla?" Truttidius queried, glancing up. "Yes," Brinnaria answered, "but I got off; my, but I was scared though."
Accordingly it was settled that Brinnaria was to face her ordeal at midday on August fifteenth of the nine hundred and thirty-seventh year after the founding of Rome, 184 of our era. That night Numisia, conferring with Brinnaria, concluded by saying: "Truttidius enjoined me to remind you to be very careful not to touch the web of the sieve with your fingers.
Besides her many duties and her indoor amusements, Brinnaria found time for much activity outside the Atrium. She had kept up her girlish friendship for the sieve-maker Truttidius, and saw him occasionally, sometimes ordering her litter halted before his shop and leaning out to ask after his health and that of his family.
Have you any suggestions to make?" "Yes," Causidiena replied. "Lutorius and Numisia and I have debated that point and have come to a conclusion which we think you might approve. The best sieve-maker in Rome is Caius Truttidius Falcifer, a tenant of one of our shops on the Holy Street.
And not even all of them together could make that happen to a woman of ordinary quality of hand and eye, with a usual sieve, as most sieves are." "Explain!" Brinnaria half whispered, "what kind of woman could actually carry water in a sieve and in what kind of a sieve, and under what circumstances?" "That's three questions," Truttidius counted, "and one at a time is enough.
Truttidius had an ailing household, though he himself was always well and never seemed to get any older. From her talks with Truttidius she came to take a personal interest in the welfare of the countless tenants in her many properties in the poorer quarters of the city. She visited some of them-a sort of approach to modern slumming by the philanthropic rich.
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