As Crates used to say, ‘Adornment is that which adorns,’ and that which adorns is that which adds to a woman’s seemliness. This is not done by gold or jewels or scarlet, but by whatever invests her with the badges of dignity, decorum, and modesty. 27. In sacrificing to Hera as goddess of marriage, the gall is not burned with the other portions of the sacrifice, but is [Sidenote: F] taken out and thrown down at the side of the altar—an indirect injunction of the legislator that gall and anger should have no place in the married state. The austerity of the lady of the house, like the dryness of wine, should be wholesome and palatable, not bitter like aloes or unpleasant like a drug. 28. Xenocrates being somewhat harsh in character, though otherwise a high type of man, Plato recommended him to _sacrifice to the Graces_. Now I take it that a woman of strict morals stands in special need of the graces in dealing with her [Sidenote: 142] husband, so that—as Metrodorus used to say—she may live with him on pleasant terms and not ‘in a temper because she is chaste’. A woman should no more forget to be amiable because she is faithful, than to be neat because she is thrifty. Decorum in a woman is rendered as disagreeable by harshness as frugality is by sluttishness. 29. A wife who is afraid to laugh and joke with her husband for fear of seeming bold and wanton, is as bad as the woman who, from fear of being thought to use ointments on her head, does not even oil it,[39] and, to avoid seeming to rouge her face, does not even wash it. We find that when poets and orators avoid appealing to the vulgar by bad taste and affectation in [Sidenote: B] respect of their diction, they practise every art to attract and stir the hearer with their matter, their treatment, and their moral quality. So the lady of the house, because she avoids and deprecates—as she is quite right to do—extravagant or meretricious demonstration, ought all the more to bring the graces of character and conduct into play in dealing with her husband, thus habituating him to proper ways, but in a pleasurable manner. If, however, a wife shows herself strait-laced and rigidly austere, her husband must put the best face upon it. When Antipater required Phocion to perform an improper and [Sidenote: C] degrading action, he answered, ‘I cannot serve you both as your friend and your toady.’ In the same way, when a woman is staid and strait-laced, our reflection should be, ‘The same woman cannot behave to me as both a wife and a mistress.’ 30. By a national custom the Egyptian women wore no shoes, so that they might keep at home all day. In the case of most women, to deprive them of gold-worked shoes, bangles, anklets, purple, and pearls, is to make them stay indoors.