'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. 'As you please,' she said, raising herself upon one hand and preparing to get up. CHAPTER V Carlo Zeno's interview with Rustan had been short and business-like, as has been said. It was indeed not at all likely that a man of the Venetian's temper and tastes would talk with a Bokharian slave-dealer a moment longer than necessary. Rustan, on hearing what was wanted, declared that he had the very thing; in fact, by a wonderful coincidence, it was the very thing in the acme of perfection, a dream, a vision, fully worth four hundred ducats, and certainly not to be sold for three hundred; it had fine natural hair that had never been dyed; its teeth were twenty-eight in number, the wisdom teeth not having yet appeared, and Rustan would wager that Messer Carlo could not find a single pearl in all Constantinople to match one of those eight-and-twenty; its ankles were so finely turned that a woman could span them with her thumb and forefinger. Rustan felt safe in saying this, for his black wife's huge hand could have spanned Zoë's throat; also it had a most beautiful and slender waist, which, as Messer Carlo remarked, was certainly a point of beauty. Moreover, Rustan would deliver a signed and sealed certificate with it.