Except Meffia her co-Vestals were immediately liked and speedily loved by Brinnaria. Meffia, a month older than herself and looking six years younger, was a small, awkward, ungainly girl, with pale blue eyes, pale yellow hair and babyish pink complexion. She had never had an ill hour in her life, yet she always appeared ailing, shrank from any effort, hated exercise and exertion and at every necessity for movement asserted that she was tired, often that she felt weak. Brinnaria thought her merely innately lazy and a natural shirk. The more she saw of her the more her loathing for her and her hatred of her intensified. Quite the reverse with the others. Manlia was a large young woman of about twenty-two, a typical Roman aristocrat, her hair between dark brown and black, her complexion swarthy, her figure abundant. Gargilia was older than Manlia; a tall, slender creature with intensely black hair and piercing black eyes that looked straight at you out of a face healthfully tinted indeed, but of a whiteness which was the envy of half the beauties in Rome. Numisia Maximilla was much like an older Manlia, but sparer and of markedly haughty bearing and carriage. Causidiena, newly become Chief Vestal, was a woman of about forty-five years of age, mild, gentle, and charming, with cool gray eyes and glossy brown hair, a being who aroused affection, inspired admiration and compelled love from all her household. She won Brinnaria’s heart at once by telling her that she herself, when she had first entered the Atrium of Vesta, had found it difficult to learn the etiquette of the order, had wanted to shout and sing and laugh out loud, to run up and down stairs instead of walking, to skip and jump. That Causidiena had triumphed over similar tendencies comforted Brinnaria and helped her to try to overcome her own. Most difficult to curb was her tendency to be rude to Meffia. This Causidiena noticed at once and set herself to obliterate. Brinnaria unbosomed herself and Causidiena listened so sympathetically that Brinnaria sat silent through the long lecture that followed and was very submissive during a searching interrogatory. She promised to comport herself as a Vestal should. “But,” she said, “I shall suffer. That girl is unpleasant in ten thousand ways, but the smell of her is the most unpleasant thing about her. She’s been tubbed and scrubbed and massaged and perfumed twice a day ever since I came here and she smells worse than a polecat, anyhow, all day long, even the moment after her maid has finished her toilet. A whiff of Meffia sets me frantic. I’d be capable of any crime to get rid of her.” More lecturing followed.