If our husbands possess any portion of it, still
we do not; whence then come its delights to us? yea, in regard to what
you call ultimate delights, we at times refuse them with violence, for
they are unpleasant to us, almost like violations: and you will see, if
you attend to it, no sign of such love in our faces: wherefore you are
trifling or jesting, if you also assert, with those seven wives, that we
think of our husbands from morning to evening, and continually attend to
their will and pleasure in order to catch from them such delights.' I
have retained thus much of what they said, that I might relate it to
you; since it is repugnant, and also in manifest contradiction, to what
I heard from you near the fountain, and which I so greedily imbibed and
believed." To this the wives sitting in the rose garden replied,
"Friend, you know not the wisdom and prudence of wives; for they totally
hide it from the men, and for no other end than that they may be loved:
for every man who is not spiritually but only naturally rational and
moral, is cold towards his wife; and the cold lies concealed in his
inmost principles.
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