The Unwilling Vestal | Page 9

age, not only in height and build, but in heart and mind. What other child would bother her head about so subtle a problem? What other child would perceive the verity at the heart of the puzzle and put it so neatly in so few words? To you an old man cannot help talking as to an experienced matron, because to you an old man can talk as to a woman of sense. You deserve to be answered in the spirit of the question."
He reflected. Brinnaria, fascinated and curious, hardly breathed in her intentness, watching his face and waiting for his answer.
"Little lady," he said, after a long silence, "the gods can, indeed, do all things. But as you have yourself perceived the gods do not do all things, even for their favorites. The gods work miracles to vindicate their votaries, but as you divine, each miracle is the happening by the special ordinance of the gods of what might happen even without their mandate, but which does not happen because it is only once in countless ages that all the circumstances necessary to bring about that sort of happening concur to produce so unusual an effect. What folks call a miracle is the occurrence, by the beneficent will of heaven, at just the right time and place, of what might happen anywhere to any one, but almost never does happen anywhere to any one, because it is so unlikely that all things should conspire to bring about so unlikely a result.
"So of carrying water in a sieve.
"Anybody might carry water in a sieve any day. But very seldom, oh, very, very seldom can it come to pass that the kind of person capable of carrying water in a sieve can be just in the condition of muscle and mood to do so and can at just that moment be in possession of just the kind of sieve that will hold water and not let it through. For an actual breathing woman of flesh and blood to carry water in a real ordinary sieve of rush-fibres, or linen thread or horsehair or metal wire, in such a sieve as pastry-cooks use to sift their finest flour; for that to happen in broad daylight under the open sky before a crowd of onlookers, that requires the special intervention of the blessed gods, or of the most powerful of them. And not even all of them together could make that happen to a woman of ordinary quality of hand and eye, with a usual sieve, as most sieves are."
"Explain!" Brinnaria half whispered, "what kind of woman could actually carry water in a sieve and in what kind of a sieve, and under what circumstances?"
"That's three questions," Truttidius counted, "and one at a time is enough.
"In the first place, no god, not all the gods together, could give any votary power to carry water in a sieve, be it rush or linen or horse-hair or metal, of which the meshes had been first scrubbed with natron or embalmers' salt or wood-ashes or fullers' earth. Water would run through such a sieve, did even all the gods will that it be retained. No one ever dipped a sieve into water and brought it up with water in it and saw that water retained by the meshes. Once wet the under side of a sieve and water will run through to the last drop.
"But if a sieve were ever so little greasy or oily, not dripping with oil or clogged with grease, but greasy as a working slave's finger is greasy on a hot day; if such a sieve were free of any drop of water on the underside, if into such a sieve water were slowly and carefully poured, as you say that Tuccia in the story ladled water into her sieve with her libation-dipper, then that water might spread evenly over the meshes to the rim all around, might deepen till it was as deep as the width of two fingers or of three, and might be retained by the meshes even for an hour, even while the sieve was carried over a rough road, up hill and down, through crowded streets.
"But few are the women who could so carry a sieve of water or could even so hold it that the water would not run through at once."
"How could the water be retained at all?" queried Brinnaria the practical. "What is the explanation?"
Truttidius wrinkled up his face in deep thought.
"You have seen wine spilled at dinner," he illustrated. "You have seen a drop of it or a splash of it fall on a sofa-cover, and you have seen it soak in and leave an ugly stain?"
"Of course," Brinnaria agreed, "often and often."
"And then again, not very often," the sieve-maker went on, "you