'The little maids are very quick and clever,' objected Zoë, who hardly looked upon the strapping African as a woman.
'No doubt, Kokóna, but this is a part of our business, and I do it better than they.'
'I would rather let them help me, if I must be helped,' said Zoë. 'But, indeed, I am quite used to dressing myself.'
'And pray,' argued the negress, grinning and growing familiar again, 'how could Rustan give his customers a written guarantee, unless I assured him, that there is no cause for complaint, no blemish, no scar, no hidden deformity, no ugly birthmark?'
Zoë turned her face away on the pillow.
'I had not thought of that,' she answered.
'Heaven forbid that I should myself,' returned the woman, relapsing into her obsequious manner again, 'if it were not to save the young Kokóna from any trouble or annoyance with our customer! If it will but please her to call herself my mistress and me her slave, she shall not be disappointed. If I am rough or clumsy she shall box my ears whenever she pleases, and I shall not complain!'
The little maids devoutly wished that Zoë would avail herself of their tyrant's extraordinary offer, but they dared not smile. She still turned her face away and was silent.
'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.