"Alack, good sir," cries she, "is there no type good enough to set them in?"
He, somewhat nettled, declares that she reads no books but of one sort, and doats on Sir Bevis and Owlglass, or Fashion's Mirror, and such like idle stuff, wherein he himself had never found so much as one word of profitable use or reasonable entertainment.
"I have read a fable," she said, "which speaks of a pasture in which oxen find fodder, hounds, hares, storks, lizards, and some animals nothing."
"To deliver you my opinion," said a lady who sat next to Polly's disputant, "I have no great esteem for letters in gentlewomen. The greatest readers be oft the worst doers."
"Letters!" cries Polly; "why, surely they be the most weighty things in creation; for so much as the difference of one letter mistaken in the order in which it should stand in a short sentence doth alter the expression of a man's resolve in a matter of life and death."
"How prove you that, madam?" quoth the lady.
"By the same token," answered Polly, "that I once did hear a gentleman say, 'I must go die a beggar,' who willed to say, 'I must go buy a dagger.'"
They all did laugh, and then some one said, "There was a witty book of emblems made on all the cardinals at Rome, in which these scarlet princes were very roughly handled. Bellarmine, for instance, as a tiger fast chained to a post, and a scroll proceeding from the beast's mouth—'Give me my liberty; you shall see what I am.' I wish," quoth the speaker, "he were let loose in this island. The queen's judges would soon constrain him to eat his words."
"Peradventure," answered Polly, "his own words should be too good food for a recusant in her majesty's prisons."
"Maybe, madam, you have tasted of that food," quoth the aforesaid lady, "that you be so well acquainted with its qualities."