At this I said, firmly, "I doubt not but what the poor man is most surely maligned." Whereupon Mistress Butter did wax exceeding wroth.
"Why wilt thou e'er be seeking to plead the cause o' villains?" cried she. "First that bloody beast o' my lady's, now this bloody villain o' th' devil's. I do wonder at thee, Anthony Butter." Whereat I did put in that I sometimes wondered at myself.
"For why?" quoth she.
"Why, that I ever married to be worded by a wench," said I. And at this I am most entirely sure that she would have cast her joint-stool at me, had she not been sitting on 't, and my lady's head against her knee. So she called me a "zany," and then after a little a "toad," but went on stroking my lady's hair.
And, by-and-by, back we come to his lordship.
"'Tis not alone his bloody tricks and murderous ways," quoth my wife, "that causes all Christian folk to abhor him, but he consorts with no other women than drabs and callets. Dost excuse that?"
"Nay," said I, with sufficient gravity, "then is this earl no longer a man, but a swine, and not fit for men's discussion, much less that of women."
At this reproof I saw anger again in her eye, but she was so pleased withal at having got me to call Lord Denbeigh a swine that she forebore any further personal affront.
"And yet," she went on, "they do say he be as fine a man as a wench will walk through the rain to glimpse at, and a brave and a learned; but that he wed a Spanish maid, and she betrayed him, and so he hath vowed to hate women, one and all."
"Hast thou seen him?"