“Should God give you such husbands, ladies, I pray you despair not until you have fully tried all means to win them back.  There are twenty-four hours in the day in which a man may change his mind, and a wife who has gained her husband over by patience and longsuffering should deem herself more fortunate than if fate and her kinsfolk had given her one more perfect.”

“It is an example,” said Oisille, “that all married women ought to follow.”

“Follow it who will,” said Parlamente; “for my own part, I should find it impossible to be patient so long.  Although in every condition patience is a seemly virtue, yet I think that in wedded life it finally produces ill-will.  For, when suffering is caused you by your partner, you are compelled to keep yourself as much apart from him as possible; and from such estrangement there springs up contempt for the faithless one; and this contempt gradually lessens love, for a thing is loved in proportion as it is esteemed.”

“But there is a danger,” said Ennasuite, “that the impatient wife may meet with a passionate husband who, instead of patience, will bring her pain.”

“And what more,” said Parlamente, “could a husband do than was done by the husband in the story?”

“What more?” said Ennasuite.  “Why, beat his wife soundly, and make her lie in the smaller bed, and his sweetheart in the larger.” (2)

2 At this period, and for some time afterwards, there were usually two beds in the master’s room, a large one for himself and his wife, and a small one in which slept a trusty servant, male or female.  These little beds are shown in some of the designs engraved by Abraham Bosse in the seventeenth century.—­L.

“It is my belief,” said Parlamente, “that a true woman would be less grieved by being beaten in anger than by being contemned for one of less worth than herself.  After enduring the severance of love, nothing that her husband could do would be able to cause her any further pain.  And in this wise the story says that the trouble she took to regain him was for the sake of her children—­which I can well believe.”

“And do you think that it showed great patience on her part,” said Nomerfide, “to kindle a fire beneath the bed on which her husband was sleeping.”

“Yes,” said Longarine; “for when she saw the smoke she waked him, and herein, perhaps, was she most to blame; for the ashes of such a husband as hers would to my thinking have been good for the making of lye.”

“You are cruel, Longarine,” said Oisille, “but those are not the terms on which you lived with your own husband.”

“No,” said Longarine, “for, God be thanked, he never gave me cause.  I have reason to regret him all my life long, not to complain of him.”

“But if he had behaved in such a manner towards you,” said Nomerfide, “what would you have done?”

“I loved him so dearly,” said Longarine, “that I believe I should have killed him, and myself as well.  To die after taking such a vengeance would have been sweeter to me than to live faithfully with the faithless.”