Heaven seems to have taken care to arm us, in regard to important questions, with a veritable long-suffering. There are fools, it is true, who seriously think of keeping their wives under lock and key, not reflecting that no better means could be devised for making them desperate and leaving them at the mercy of Tom, Dick or Harry—the first passing officer. Such men only get their deserts. But there are also shrewd men who keep their eyes shut to what it is best not to see: everybody advises them to do so, or, what is better, gives them every assistance. There must be a special providence, even, watching over the wives.[99] A wife, on the contrary, can hardly remain in ignorance of her husband’s laxities, for these most often manifest themselves in the broad daylight, and sometimes under his own roof. Many stories might be told about chambermaids such as we read of in Scripture, but a little too mercenary, to be sure: for the courts showed so much generosity in assessing the damages due in such circumstances that artless little Chloes have been known to bamboozle the judges and profit handsomely by a mishap that was wholly imaginary. In Italy, men of the world had a sure and simple custom, which consisted merely in buying a young slave-girl. In the market of Venice, a pretty Russian, a fair Circassian, a well-built Tartar girl between twenty-five and thirty years of age would fetch from six to eighty-seven ducats. It needs no showing how well this institution was suited to platonism; the most eminent platonists did not disdain it. The mother of Carlo de’ Medici was a lovely Circassian girl, purchased in this way by the grave and aesthetic Cosimo. It would never have occurred to a wife to desert her home for such a grievance as this; to do so would have made her a general laughing-stock. She might feel keen inward suffering; perhaps her heart would close a little more towards the earth and open out towards heaven; but this experience would be of use to her, and a woman who was genuinely an idealist would almost rejoice at it. It would teach her to show a firm and lofty front to the world, to live among her ideals, to form a low estimate of men. Domestic quarrels really spring from the crabbed sour virtues, the insufferable respectabilities. Men are hard to please. One moment they find a wife in the way: the next they expect her to be perfect. She ought every morning, as an old author explains, to put on the slippers of humility, the shift of decorum, the corset of chastity, the garters of steadfastness, the pins of patience, and so on; but it is by no means proved that in such a case a husband would not think his wife a little over-dressed.