Dame Pertelote is drawn with even greater skill. The impatience with which she listens to Chauntecleer's account of his dream is just what we should expect of a sensible, unimaginative, middle-class woman, whose own nerves and digestion were in excellent order, if her husband came to her with a long story of a supernatural warning. Dreams, she says, are the natural consequence of over-eating; the best thing he can do is to take some of the herbs she recommends, and when he has pecked these up, "right as they growe" and "ete hem in" he will find all his nervousness and depression disappear. Chauntecleer is furious at being treated with such scant respect and proceeds to overwhelm her with examples of dreams that have come true. His wise wife, who knows when to hold her tongue, makes no attempt to answer him back, but is evidently only too thankful when at last, being convinced that he has established his point, he suffers his attention to be distracted and turns to the pleasanter business of love-making. Pertelote is in fact typical of the good wives of her class, as the Wife of Bath is of the bad. She is no more a heroine than the Wife of Bath is a villainess, but the one studies her husband's comforts and thoroughly understands how to make him happy, while the other cares for nothing but her own amusement. Pertelote's lamentations when Chauntecleer is borne off are in the best taste. Restraint was considered no virtue in a medieval widow, and Pertelote very properly screams loudly and persistently. Nor does wifely affection go unrewarded. The "sely widwe" and her daughters who own the hen-yard Herden thise hennes cry and maken wo, And out at dores steten they anoon, with the result that Chauntecleer is saved.