“Are you perfectly sure of that?” she persisted. “If you could make me perfectly sure of that, I should feel a great deal better. Are you sure?” “I can’t see any real harm in your pranks,” the Emperor said. “I certainly should not encourage you to continue or repeat such conduct or to revert to it, but I see no real harm in it.” “You think I have not unfitted myself for my duties?” The Emperor meditated. “To a certainty,” he said, “if your conduct was intentional, if you thought up these pranks of yours and perpetrated them, with deliberate consciousness of what you were about to do, I should hold you gravely unfitted for your position. But you are manifestly sincere in your efforts to be all you ought to be and are trying genuinely to overcome your tendencies and to outgrow your coltishness. I am of the opinion that, if you curb yourself from now on, you have done no harm.” “Do you think,” Brinnaria insisted, “that if you called a meeting of all the colleges of pontiffs and put the question to them, that they would make the same answer you have made?” “You amazing child!” Aurelius exclaimed. “Why should you assume the attitude of advocate against yourself? Why suggest a synod to discuss your conduct and express an official opinion on it? Is not my opinion enough? Even if I saw fit to call a synod and all the members of it held the same views and expressed them never so cogently, do you not realize that, if my views were contrary to theirs, it would be my view that would prevail; that it would not only be my privilege and my right but my imperative duty to override any opposition and to enforce my decision? Are you not satisfied with the opinions of the man who is at once Emperor and Chief Pontifex of Rome?” “But,” Brinnaria persisted, “I am not at all sure that you are speaking as Emperor and Chief Pontifex. To me you seem to speak as a kindly husband and father very sympathetic towards another man’s little daughter who comes to you in deep trouble of spirit.” “You amazing child!” the Emperor repeated. “You talk as if you were forty years old. Tell me precisely what is troubling you, for I must have failed to fathom it, and be sure I shall reply officially as Emperor and Pontifex.”