This bringeth me to yet another tale, which I am fain, diverting and droll as it is, to mingle among the more serious ones. Well, then! I have heard it told by an honourable gentleman and a good friend of mine own, how a lady of his native place, having often shown great familiarities and special favour to one of her chamber lackeys, which did only need time and opportunity to come to a point, the said lackey, neither a prude nor a fool, finding his mistress one morning half asleep and lying on her bed, turned over away from the wall, tempted by such a display of beauty and a posture making it so easy and convenient, she being at the very edge of the bed, he did come up softly, and alongside the lady. She turning her head saw ’twas her lackey, which she was fain of; and just as she was, her place occupied and all, without withdrawing or moving one whit, and neither resisting nor trying in the very least to shake off the hold he had of her, did only say to him, turning round her head only and holding still for fear of losing him, “Ho! ho! Mister prude, and what hath made you so bold as to do this?” The lackey did answer with all proper respect, “Madam, shall I leave?”—“That’s not what I said, Mister prude,” the lady replied, “I ask you, what made you so bold as to put yourself there?” But the other did ever come back to the same question, “Madam, shall I stop? if you wish, I will go out,”—and she to repeating again and again, “That is not what I say, not what I say, Mister prude!” In fact, the pair of them did make these same replies and repetitions three or four times over,—which did please the lady far better than if she had ordered her gallant to stop, when he did ask her. Thus it did serve her well to stick to her first question without ever a variation, and the lover in his reply and the repetition thereof. And in this wise did they continue to lie together for long after, the same rubric being always repeated as an accompaniment. For ’tis, as men say, the first batch only, and the first measure of wine, that costs dear. A good lackey and an enterprising! To such bold fellows we must needs say in the words of the Italian proverb, _A bravo cazzo mai non manca favor_. Well, from all this you learn how that there be many men which are brave, bold and valiant, as well in arms as in love; others which be so in arms, but not in love; others again, which be so in love and not in arms. Of this last sort was that rascally Paris, who indeed had hardihood and valiance enough to carry off Helen from her poor cuckold of a husband Menelaus, but not to do battle with him before Troy town.