In the light of what we have narrated, it is obvious that there were occasions in Franklin's nuptial life when it was well that he was a philosopher as well as a husband. "You can bear with your own Faults, and why not a fault in your Wife?," is a question that he is known to have asked at least once, and he did not have to leave his own doorstep to find an application for his injunction, "Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards." But if there was defect of temper there was never any defect of devotion upon the part of the jealous, high-spirited, courageous wife. It is true that she had no place in the wider sphere of her husband's existence. She did not concern herself even about such a political controversy as that over the Stamp Tax except to say like the leal wife she was that she was sure that her husband had not done anything to hurt anybody. You are very prudent [he said to her on one occasion] not to engage in Party Disputes. Women never should meddle with them except in Endeavour to reconcile their Husbands, Brothers, and Friends, who happen to be of contrary Sides. If your Sex can keep cool, you may be a means of cooling ours the sooner, and restoring more speedily that social Harmony among Fellow-Citizens, that is so desirable after long and bitter Dissensions. Her interest in her husband's electrical studies probably ceased when he wrote to her as follows with reference to the two bells that he had placed in his house in such a position as to ring when an iron rod with which they were connected was electrified by a storm cloud: "If the ringing of the Bells frightens you, tie a Piece of Wire from one Bell to the other, and that will conduct the lightning without ringing or snapping, but silently." She never became equal even to such social standing as her husband acquired for himself by his talents and usefulness in Philadelphia; and she would have been a serious clog upon him in the social circles to which he was admitted in Great Britain and on the Continent, if her aversion to crossing the ocean had not been insurmountable. Her letters are marked by a degree of illiteracy that make the task of reading them almost like the task of reading an unfamiliar foreign tongue; but it should be recollected that in the eighteenth century in America it was entirely possible for a person to be at once illiterate and a lady. Even Franklin with his _penchant_ for simplified spelling must have felt, after meditating some of Deborah's written words, that the orthographical line had to be drawn somewhere. The following letter from her to her husband, dated October ye 29, 1773, and transcribed exactly as written is neither better nor worse than the rest of her epistles to her husband: