Her call was answered by a great brute of a slave, bigger even than her father, a gigantic Goth, pink-skinned, blue-eyed and yellow-haired.
“Now listen to me, Guntello,” his little mistress said, “for if you make any mistake about my errand you’ll get me into no end of trouble.”
The Goth, manifestly devoted to her, leaned his ear close and grinned amiably. She repeated her directions twice and made him repeat them after her in his broken Latin. When she was sure that he understood, she despatched him with a whispered injunction:
“Hurry! Hurry!”
Meanwhile, in the gorgeous atrium, the fathers’ conference had continued. The moment she had gone Pulfennius said:
“I do not believe in discussing misunderstandings before females; evidently there is some misunderstanding here. I want for my son a bride younger than he is, even if he has to wait two or even four years to claim her. You assured me that your daughter Brinnaria was not yet ten years of age and you show me a grown woman and tell me that she is Brinnaria. What is the explanation?”
“A very simple explanation,” he was answered. “Merely that Brinnaria is unusually well grown and well developed for her age. I have seen other cases of early ripening in children and so must you.”
“I’ve seen girls grown beyond their years,” Pulfennius admitted, “but no case comparable to this. Why, man, that girl who has just left us would be taken for over eighteen years old by any stranger at first sight of her, and no one on earth could look at her carefully and hazard the conjecture that she might possibly be under sixteen.”
“Quite so,” his host agreed, “and the better you know Brinnaria the more you wonder at her. She not only looks sixteen or eighteen and acts as if she were that age, but she talks as if she were that old and thinks as if she were even older, and she is actually three full months, more than three months, to be precise three months and twelve days, under ten years of age.”
“Amazing!” spluttered Pulfennius, “astounding! inexplicable!”