This last piece of ingenuity was allowed by the court to surpass the first. "Now," I cried, "what should be the greatest torment a parent could inflict on a child?" Martin answered: "If it should be fond of public diversion, to confine it in-doors. If retirement suits its temper, to compel it abroad. If it should delight in the theatre, to take it to see a good play, and at the moment when the plot shall wax most moving, to say it must be tired, and procure to send it home. Or, in more weighty matters,--a daughter's marriage, for instance,--to detect if the wench hath set her heart on one lover, and if so, to keep from her the knowledge of this gentleman's addresses; and when she hath accepted another, to let her know the first had sued for her hand, and been dismissed." Here all the young gentlewomen did exclaim that Master Sherwood could by no means think of a more skilful torment than this should prove. He thought for an instant, and then said: "It should be a finer and more delicate torment to stir up in a young gentlewoman's mind suspicions of one she loved, and so work on her natural passions of jealousy and pride, that she should herself, in a hasty mood, discard her lover; and ever after, when the act was not recallable, remind her she herself had wrought her own unhappiness, and wounded one she loved." "Yea, that should be worse than the first torment," all but one young lady cried out; who, for her part, could better endure, she said, to have injured herself than to be deceived, as in the first case. "Then do come husbands," quoth Mr. Martin; "and I vow," he cried, "I know not how to credit there be such vile wretches in the world as should wish to torment their wives; but if such there be, methinks the surest method they may practise is, to loving wives to show indifferency; to such as be jealous, secrecy; to such as be pious, profaneness; and the like in all the points whereon their affections are set." "Alack!" cried Mistress Frances Bellamy, "what a study the man hath made of this fine art! Gentlewomen should needs beware of such a one for a husband. What doth Master Sherwood say?" Whereupon he: "Methinks the greatest torment a husband might inflict on a worthy wife should be to dishonor her love by his baseness; or if he had injured her, to doubt her proneness to forgive." "And wives," quoth Mistress Southwell,--"what of their skill therein, gentlemen?"