lashed 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