She was then a tall, grave girl of nineteen, looking and behaving like a woman of twenty-five. Very handsome she was, full-fleshed without a trace of plumpness, fun breasted without a hint of overabundance. Her brown hair, now grown long again after its ceremonial shearing at her entrance into the order of Vestals, was so dark that it was almost black. Arranged in the six braids traditional for Vestals and wound round her head like a coronet it became her notably. Her complexion was creamy, with a splendid brilliant color that came and went in her cheeks. Her expression of face was an indescribable blend of kindliness and haughtiness towards others, of austerity and cheerfulness inwardly, of intellectuality and comprehension towards life at large. She had acquired the statuesqueness of the conventional Vestal attitudes and movements, but she sat and stood so that all beholders felt a vivid impression of her vitality, of reserve strength, incomparably beyond anything possessed by her five colleagues. Her stately pacing as she walked always appeared the conscious restraint of what, of itself, would have been a swinging stride. She wore her clothes with an unanalyzable difference, with a sort of effrontery, as Calvaster put it in talking of her to his cronies. On her way to the palace, erect in her white robe amid the gorgeous crimson hangings of her gilded state coach, she meditated on the great dissimilarity between the feelings with which she had gone to her first audience with the Emperor and those with which she now approached his abode. Then she had been palpitating with conscientious scruples and childish dreads, now she was sure of herself and of her errand; then she had thought chiefly of her mother and of the traditions of her family and clan, now not only her mother was dead, but the whole family of the Epulones had perished except herself and the Brinnarian clan was represented by but three families, her relationship to which was fainter than any assignable degree of cousinship; then she had been full of elation at her lofty position in the world, now she was perfectly at home in her environment and felt no emotion at the thought of it. At the palace she found herself in the same vast room, alone with a somewhat older and graver Emperor, now sole ruler of their world since the death of his colleague, Lucius Verus. He greeted her kindly, with an air of effort to conceal his weariness, and when both were seated asked her errand. “In the first place,” she said, “I want you to tell me whether you are satisfied with the reports you have had of me.” Aurelius half smiled.