Causidiena suggested that she accompany Brinnaria on her visit to the Palace.
“It would be lovely to have you with me,” Brinnaria said, “and I am ever so grateful for your offer. You are a dear and I love you. I shall want you and wish for you all the way there, all the time I am there and all the way back. I shall be scared to death. But I must go alone. In the first place it is my right, if I were only six years old, to have audience with the Emperor alone whenever I ask for it and as often as I ask for it. I am not going to abate an iota of my rights merely for my own comfort. In the second place, I must go through this unhelped and unsupported all by myself. I know it; I must fight it out alone and come through alone. He’ll be sympathetic, if I deserve it. If I don’t deserve sympathy from him I don’t deserve it from you, nor your company and your countenance, either.”
Scared Brinnaria was, but even through her worst qualms of panic she was uplifted by an elating sense of her own importance. Not her encounter with Verus and his retinue, not her having remained seated when Aurelius entered the Colosseum had so poignantly made her realize how exalted was a Vestal. She drove to the Palace alone, not in her light carriage, but in her huge state coach, feeling very small in her white robes amid all that crimson upholstery, but also feeling herself a very great personage.
Her reception at the Palace made her feel even more so. The magnificence of the courtyard in which her coach came to a standstill, the ceremonial of turning out the guard in her honor, the formality with which she was conducted from corridor to corridor and from hail to hail, the immensity and gorgeousness of the vast audience hall in which she was finally left alone with the Emperor; all these did not so much overwhelm her as exalt her. She felt herself indeed a princess.
The Emperor greeted Brinnaria kindly, was as sympathetic as possible and put her at her ease at once. He soothed her, made her seat herself comfortably and said:
“Don’t worry about what you have done. You are certainly the most startling Vestal since Gegania, but you have really done nothing actually wrong. So do not agitate yourself about what cannot be altered. The question which concerns me is, what will you do next?”
“I think,” said Brinnaria, “that the next thing I shall do will be to procure a good strong rope and hang myself.”
“My child,” the shocked Emperor exclaimed, “you really should not speak so flippantly of so dreadful an idea!”
“I’m not a particle flippant this time,” Brinnaria declared. “I know I am often flippant, but not now, not a bit. I am just as serious as life and death. I have thought of nothing but suicide since Trebellius conducted me back to my seat. I can’t get the idea out of my head and that is why I have come to you.”
“Tell me all about it from the beginning,” the Emperor said, comfortingly. “What put the notion into your head?”