With a slightly heightened colour, Lady Harman read on and presently found another page slashed with Sir Isaac’s approval.... Her face became thoughtful. Did he mean to attempt—Petruchio? He could never dare. There were servants, there were the people one met, the world.... He would never dare.... What a strange play it was! Shakespear of course was wonderfully wise, the crown of English wisdom, the culminating English mind,—or else one might almost find something a little stupid and clumsy.... Did women nowadays really feel like these Elizabethan wives who talked—like girls, very forward girls indeed, but girls of sixteen?... She read the culminating speech of Katherine and now she had so forgotten Sir Isaac she scarcely noted the pencil line that endorsed the immortal words. “Thy husband is thy Lord, thy Life, thy Keeper, Thy Head, thy Sovereign; one who cares for thee, And for thy maintenance commits his body To painful labour both by sea and land, To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, While thou liest warm at home, secure and safe; And craves no other tribute at thy hands But love, fair looks, and true obedience; Too little payment for so great a debt. Such duty as the Subject owes the Prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband; And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour, And not obedient to his honest will, What is she but a foul contending Rebel And graceless traitor to her loving Lord? I am ashamed that women are so simple To offer war, where they should kneel for peace; My mind has been as big as one of yours, My heat as great; my reason, haply, more, To bandy word for word and frown for frown. But now I see our lances are but straws; Our strength is weak, our weakness past compare, Seeming that most which we indeed least are....” She wasn’t indignant. Something in these lines took hold of her protesting imagination. She knew that so she could have spoken of a man. But that man,—she apprehended him as vaguely as an Anglican bishop apprehends God. He was obscured altogether by shadows; he had only one known characteristic, that he was totally unlike Sir Isaac. And the play was false she felt in giving this speech to a broken woman. Such things are not said by broken women. Broken women do no more than cheat and lie. But so a woman might speak out of her unconquered wilfulness, as a queen might give her lover a kingdom out of the fullness of her heart. §7