“‘Marche joliettement,’ walk prettily, mincingly, showing your pretty little shoes, so well made they fit without a wrinkle.... And if your dress trail behind on the pavement, yet take thought to lift it a little towards the front, as if the wind had caught it, so that every one who passes you may notice the dainty well-shod slimness of your feet. “And if you have a long mantle--one of those long, full cloaks that almost entirely hide your charming figure--with your two hands and your two arms manage to open it wide in front, whether the day be fair or foul, even as a peacock spreads his tail.” XII Let us not think that the fourteenth-century castle was entirely peopled by men and women in the bloom of idle youth. There were charitable widows whose conversation was in heaven; there were knights strong and resolute in their absolute religion. In spite of all its mediocrity, alongside of its frivolity, its often criminal looseness of the marriage tie, the fourteenth century was an age of piety and honour. Every gentleman had two religions, for either of which he would have died; and the briefest record of life in the castle must find a place for the observances of the Church and the duties of chivalry. We cannot lay too great a stress upon the austerity, upon the charity, inherent in the ideal woman of a period whose great ladies were so often purely worldly and emotional. We should leave our readers under a false conception if we let them suppose that the women of a fourteenth-century castle were invariably after the pattern of the sprightly Dame des Belles-Cousines, or of the sweeter Lady of Fayel. “Even in a palace life can be lived well.” No saint in her cloister was purer than Madame Olive de Belleville, “la plus courtoise dame et la plus humble;” stern to herself, fasting daily, wearing the hair-shirt on her tender flesh, but to all others most pitiful and gentle, visiting the sick, helping poor women in childbirth, praying on the graves of poor or aged people who had few to mourn them. And, by a rare virtue, she was charitable not only to the unhappy; she knew no less how to welcome and honour the well-to-do, the honourable, the unpathetic; she knew how to deck with fair, white raiment the smiling daughters of ruined gentle-folk, who else would have gone to their bridegrooms without a jewel or a wedding garment. She was hospitable, and even lavish, to the careless minstrel folk, so that they made a “Ballad of Regret” when at last she left them. Above all, she would never hear ill of anybody. And when the ugly story went round in whispers, and the worldly and the sceptical smiled half-content, this good woman, who denied herself the simplest pleasures, would hasten to excuse the sinner, to doubt if the tale were true; or, were it proven, then she would say that God would amend it, and that His judgments and His mercy alike were marvellous, and would one day astound us all. So that in her neighbourhood none went