Now then, all this was very interesting, most interesting, and you really regretted having to return to the topic of the sword Flamberge—Freydis had not made up her mind: she might or might not give the sword, and her deciding must pivot upon what harm you meant to do with it. Her visitor from the more cheery world of daylight was thus forced to make a clean breast of why he needed Flamberge, the only sword that may spill the blood of the Léshy, so that he might give, by the old ritual, his unborn child, and rid himself of his wife. Whereon Queen Freydis expressed frank indignation, because the child would by this plan be rescued from all, and the woman from much, sorrow. Could even a small madman in bottle-green and silver suppose that the Queen of Antan, after centuries of thriving malevolence, was thus to be beguiled into flagrant philanthropy? But it was not, in the long run, philanthropy, you insisted. It was depressing to have to argue about anything in this gray, vague, gleaming, endless place, wherein you seemed only to whisper: and you were, privately, a little taken aback by the unaccustomed need to prove an action, not amply precedented and for the general good, but the precise contrary. Aloud,—though not actually aloud, but in the dim speech one uses in Antan,—you contended that when a man thus rid himself of his wife he did harm and worked great mischief, because the spectacle made all beholders unhappy. Women of course had obvious reasons for uneasiness lest the example be followed generally: and men were roused to veritable frenzies of pious reprovings when they saw the thing they had so often thought of doing accomplished by somebody else. Did married men, then, at heart always desire to murder their wives? was what Freydis wondered. No, you did not say that: not always; some wives let weeks go by without provoking that desire. And to appearances, most men became in the end more or less reconciled to having their wives about. Still, let us not go wholly by appearances. Let us be logical! Whom does any man most dislike? Freydis had settled down, with faint golden shimmerings, upon a couch that was covered with gray cushions, and she meditated. What person does any man most dislike? Why, Freydis estimated, the person who most frequently annoys him, the person with whom he finds himself embroiled in the most bitter quarrels, the person whose imperfections are to him most glaringly apparent, and, in fine, the person who most often and most poignantly makes him uncomfortable.