“But now methinks, as I have read some poets, who when they intend to tell some horrible matter, they bid men shun the hearing of it, so if I do not desire you to stop your ears from me, yet may I well desire a breathing time, before I am to tell the execrable treason of Antiphilus that brought her to this misery, and withal wish you all, that from all mankind indeed you stop your ears. O most happy were we, if we did set our loves one upon another.” And as she spake that word, her cheeks in red letters writ more than her tongue did speak. “And therefore since I have named Plangus, I pray you, sister,” said she, “help me with the rest, for I have held the stage long enough; and if it please you to make his fortune known, as I have done Erona’s, I will after take heart again to go on with his falsehood; and so between us both, my Lady Zelmane shall understand both the cause and parties of this lamentation.” “Nay, I beshrew me then,” said Miso, {196} “I will none of that, I promise you, as long as I have the government, I will first have my tale, and then my Lady Pamela, my Lady Zelmane, and my daughter Mopsa (for Mopsa was then returned from Amphialus) may draw cuts, and the shortest cut speak first. For I tell you, and this may be suffered, when you are married, you will have first and last word of your husbands.” The ladies laughed to see with what an eager earnestness she looked, having threatened not only in her ferret eyes, but while she spoke her nose seeming to threaten her chin, and her shaking limbs one to threaten another. But there was no remedy, they must obey, and Miso, sitting on the ground with her knees up, and her hands upon her knees, tuning her voice with many a quavering cough, thus discoursed unto them. “I tell you true,” said she, “whatsoever you think of me, you will one day be as I am; and I, simple though I sit here, thought once my penny as good silver, as some of you do: and if my father had not played the hasty fool, it is no lie I tell you, I might have had another-gains husband than Dametas. But let that pass, God amend him; and yet I speak it not without good cause. You are full in your tittle-tattlings of Cupid, here is Cupid and there is Cupid. I will tell you now what a good old woman told me, what an old wise man told her, what a great learned clerk told him, and gave it him in writing: and here I have it in my prayer-book.” “I pray you,” said Philoclea, “let us see it and read it.” “No haste, but good,” said Miso, “you shall first know how I came by it. I was a young girl of seven and twenty years old, and I could not go through the street of our village, but I might hear the young men talk: O the pretty little eyes of Miso: O the fine thin lips of Miso: O the goodly fat hands of Miso: besides, how well a certain wrying in my neck became me. Then the one would wink with one eye, and the other cast daisies at me. I must confess, seeing so many amorous, it made me set up my peacock’s tail with the highest.